Adapt & Evolve. How Guittard's Sweet Strategy Continues To Pay Off.

0:10Hello friends, I'm Ray Latif and you're listening to the number one podcast for anyone building a business in food or beverage, Taste Radio. This episode features an interview with Amy Guitard, the CMO and a fifth-generation family owner of Guitard Chocolate. How does a 156-year-old business continually evolve to meet the needs and palates of modern consumers? It's a question that Amy Guitard often thinks about. Amy is the CMO of Guitard Chocolate, a family-owned and operated chocolate company founded in 1868. Based in the Bay Area, Guitard's primary business is as a supplier of premium chocolate to some of the world's most recognizable candy and sweets brands, as well as large and independent bakeries.

1:02Guitard also markets consumer products, such as baking chips, chocolate bars, and cocoa powder. Following a six-year career at Clif Bar, Amy joined Guitard in 2012 and has led brand strategy, building and refining its platform initiatives. She's also played a key role in the company's innovation strategy, supporting the development of products that have enhanced the offerings of Guitard's business customers. In the following interview, Amy speaks about the duality of her role as both a steward and agent of change for Gattard, the challenge of competing with both small artisanal brands and large conglomerates, how she helped the company navigate a major threat to its core business, and how she thinks about creating more affordable and accessible products for consumers.

1:56Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now I'm honored to be sitting down with Amy Guitard, who is the CMO of Guitard Chocolate Company. Amy, great to see you. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for coming all the way from San Francisco to come and see me here at the Fancy Food Show. That's the only reason you came here, right? It's 100 % the only reason, absolutely. Yeah, how many times have you been here? Oh my gosh. To this show, that is. Probably 50 times. 50 times, really? Okay. Well, there's two shows a year. You're right. And I'm 41. Okay. And it's my family business. So I just take it the fact that we've been going since maybe before I remember.

2:30I don't know. Maybe that's being a little too wild. No, no. I mean, we were just talking about the fact that you grew up coming here. Yes. As well. I always used to come to the New York show as a kid. My family owned a chain of gourmet food stores. And I was very lucky to grow up on tinned fish and high ends, charcuterie and things like that. I was never a big cheese guy. this is something that I don't really share too much on the podcast because it's not it's not like that I have a hate or like a real distaste for cheese it's just that's not something for me well you know people come here they just gorge oh yeah I always say that you walk the aisles and you're like looking for something savory and then you eat something savory and then you want something sweet then you eat something sweet and you're like oh I need something savory to you know shift my palate yeah find something savory and the cycle just goes on and on for the entirety of the show.

3:18And by then you just get to try everything. Totally. Totally. I started going to the winter show about 10 years ago. And part of the reason I'd love to go to that show is because it was in San Francisco where you're based. It sucks that it's not there anymore. I don't know. We miss it. Yeah. Yeah. We miss it. I actually haven't been to the Vegas show. It's good. It's not. Just a different vibe. It's a different place. Yeah. Like the Moscone Center, even though it's sort of underground and kind of dark down there, like when you get out, you know, you have that wonderful, vibrant city. Yeah. Well, we don't have, I mean, we have good food awards and mercantile and stuff, but other than that, this is, that was the show, the big like food show that we had.

3:56So we miss it. I love coming to New York. I used to live here. I went to college here. So it's nice to come back to the city and then, you know, winter fancy food as well in Vegas. Yeah. So yeah. Your, uh, your brand has a big presence here at the fancy food show, as I would expect. Yes. Yeah. You know, guitar chocolate, I think people are very familiar with your brand. I don't know how many people are familiar with the history of your brand. Talk a bit about how it started, the origins and where it is today in terms of retail distribution and whatnot. Yeah. So Guitard is the oldest continuously family owned chocolate company in the country.

4:29It was founded by my great, great grandfather in 1868. He came from France looking for gold, like many people, and he brought chocolate with him to trade for mining supplies. His uncle had a chocolate factory in France. We got to San Francisco. He realized that the merchants were the ones that were doing better than the gold miners. So we went back to France, learned how to make chocolate, and then returned to San Francisco. Our first factory was on Sansom Street. So right along the Embarcadero, if you can envision that, is where all the commodities were being brought in. And you can imagine Folgers Coffee, Hills Brothers Coffee, Ghirardelli, Guitard, all these sort of coffee roasters, chocolate makers, all along the Embarcadero.

5:05So there's stories of just smells of coffee roasting and cocoa beans roasting kind of in the air. And they were so close to where the piers were, where the beans and commodities were being brought in. So it was pretty seamless. At the time, you couldn't subsist on making one thing. So we didn't just make chocolate. We did coffees, teas, and spices as well, anything that you could grind. So we'd bring all that in. We'd sell them as a sort of a purveyor. And then the 1906 earthquake happened, burned our factory down. And that's when we consolidated down just to making chocolate. We moved our factory to Main Street, which is not too far from that original factory.

5:38and we were there until the early 50s. And by that time, we moved our factory down to Burlingame, which is where we are today. Imminent Domain, they decided to build a freeway over our San Francisco factory on Main Street, but that's the factory that my dad grew up going to when he was a young kid. And then in the early 50s, that's when we moved down to Burlingame. So we've been there ever since. It's where we roast, mill, refine, conch, deposit most of our products. And then we have a second facility up in Fairfield, which is about an hour or so north of San Francisco. and that's where we have our new dairy-free line, a lot of high-speed packaging, newer equipment, but everything's still roasted in Burlingame.

6:15And Guitart is sold globally? We're sold globally. A lot of people don't realize about 80 % of our business is B2B, so we sell chocolate in as an ingredient to pastry chefs, confectioners, bakeries, things like that, other CPG companies that use chocolate, again, as an ingredient, and then a smaller portion of our business is on the retail side, So baking chips, baking bars, baking wafers, cocoa powders, things for home bakers to use. You can buy us at Whole Foods and other sort of premium grocery stores. Has that always been the case? Has it always been 80 % sold B2B and 20 % retail? I'd say so, yeah.

6:50I mean, I think most of our bread and butter has always been, even back historically, you know, kind of selling chocolate as an ingredient. Or, you know, our first product was the equivalent of what our grand cacao is, but it was called sweet ground chocolate. And it was intended for drinking. You could also bake with it. We have a really old school recipe book that I found in our archives, which we're not great at our archives. They're in just like an old box. But I was fishing through it. We just recently read it at our office. And I was like, oh, my God, this is cool. And it had all recipes for using, again, what our Grand Cacao is, which is a cocoa powder.

7:24But it's got sugar and chocolate into it as well. It's awesome to bake with. But it's, you know, it's merchandised and marketed as a hot cocoa drink. But that was our first product that was intended for consumers. We have an old advertisement that says when the sun comes up, Guitard comes down. And it's a graphic of like a hand reaching up on a kitchen pantry shelf and pulling it off the shelf for like to make your drink. So kind of like kitschy. But I think the way that people have consumed chocolate and just in general, it's shifted over time. But it's been 80-20 for as long as I can remember.

7:55Has the company benefited from the fact that it's easier in some ways to sell B2B? Oh, I wouldn't say it's easier. I just say it's so different. We always say people buy from people. You know, for us as a family business, relationships are so important to us. A lot of our B2B business we've had for a really long time. We also have such a support network at our company. We have a great R &D team. We have an awesome quality assurance team production. And so we really see our ability to partner with customers on the B2B side as helping them make the best product. I kind of call it this evolution of artistry.

8:32So a lot of the work that we do on the ground with farmers is around flavor and quality and investing in flavor so that they're able to cultivate a fine flavor beans that we can give them sort of a premium for that. But with the quality sort of cocoa farmers are sort of artists unto themselves in terms of their cultivation of cocoa beans. We get those beans and we sort of bestow our own level of artistry on those beans when we roast them, when we make a chocolate, and then we give it to whoever is receiving the product. In this case, as we're talking about, an artisan baker or someone making a cookie and packaging it and selling it on the shelf for consumer to buy.

9:09That's a whole other level of artistry. And so again, if you think about what we do as that, as sort of this culmination of collective collaboration, whether it's working with the cocoa farmers or giving a product to an end user. It's that idea of relationship building and working together. And so again, I don't think it's easier or better. I think it's just very different. On the consumer side, we look at that as an educational opportunity. The consumer shelf is so saturated in so many different categories. Chocolate as well, particularly on the eating bar segment, which we don't have eating bars per se, but we play in the baking section.

9:45And we've got chips and wafers and bars and consumers you're like, what's the difference between them? So we take it upon ourselves to try to educate consumers, which again is like a very different world than the B2B side. So I wouldn't even compare them. I would just say they're two totally different worlds that we love playing in equally. Well, I think the through line is that people recognize Guitard as a premium, perhaps even a super premium chocolate brand. And I was in a baker, well, I guess it was like a bakery shop. It was a place to buy your flour and your chocolate. and what have you in Cambridge, Massachusetts two weekends ago.

10:21And I saw Guitar Chocolate there. And there were some other local brands as well. I think that might be a challenging, I guess, thing for your company these days is that when people talk about artisanal chocolate, a lot of times they think about small local brands. And your brand has such history behind it and such consistency behind that history in terms of flavor and the quality of chocolate that you sell, you know, you're very comparable, I think, in some ways, probably even better than some of the local brands. But people will think otherwise. People will think, oh, they're a big brand, so they're not as good.

11:01So how do you talk about that with consumers? How do you fight that battle? Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't know if I have an actual answer. I think it's one of those things that as a over 150-year-old family business, you're always fighting a battle like that. I always say we're the smallest of the big guys and the biggest of the small guys, which puts us in a really interesting place in terms of being nimble and flexible and also just having an ability to do volume really, really well. And we pride ourselves on consistency and quality and innovation and things like that. And so, you know, from a marketing side of things, putting new products on shelf, we just launched a 70, I say just, it feels like it was just, but a 72 % coconut sugar sweetened product that sort of emerged and evolved out of a lot of the products that you were seeing on shelf that were responding to the keto and paleo movement.

11:49We never want to put anything on shelf that we don't love. But we also saw that there was this, albeit trends change, right? But there was this, as you mentioned earlier, but we saw that there was clearly like a market need for something in that space. And so we created this new product that was coconut sugar sweetened. It has anilin in it. So it delivers one gram net carb, which if you're a keto lover, that's speaking to you in that language. but it was also really innovative. The flavor profile is beautiful. It's a 72%. So it kind of hits on a lot of different demands within that space. And so I think doing things like that, that product's available both on the food service side of our business, as well as our consumer side of our business, which gives us an opportunity to kind of have both feed each other, if that makes sense.

12:34And so I think, you know, having new innovative products is a quote unquote, easy way to keep yourselves top of mind and remind consumers that we are a fresh brand that they can resonate with. But I also think, you know, chocolate's such an emotional product. People oftentimes look at a brand like Guitard or in other, you know, adjacent categories. And it is a brand that they know and love from their childhood oftentimes, and kind of recreating an adult relationship with it as they grow up and that we're a brand that they can trust and explore and innovate with. I think that's the key to what we do in terms of engaging with consumers and trying to remain relevant.

13:17When you are talking to bakeries, whether they're large or small and trying to convince them to use your products, I mean, it's probably not that hard to convince them to use your products. But again, thinking about, I'm just going to bring up an example. There's a local bakery in Brookline where I live, Brookline, Massachusetts, it's called Clearflower. And they just have some of the most delicious croissants you could find anywhere in the world. Check it out, folks. But I don't know what chocolate they use. And I would think that if they're using a local brand, it wouldn't surprise me. But if they're using Guitardi, it wouldn't surprise me either.

13:51But what's that conversation like? And again, this is a small bakery, but for every independent bakery, you add them all up, that's a significant business for sure. But what's the selling point when you're talking to the bakery owners. Again, you mentioned that there's a real emotional connection between consumers, but if your brand, the Guitard brand isn't listed as an ingredient, how does the consumer know that it's you? Well, we always say you've probably had more Guitard than you realize. Okay. So if you think about it, there's CPG companies that are using Guitard as a packaged product. And then there's the bakeries and restaurants, pastry chefs, confectioners, and then that have could potentially do menu placement or promote, you know, in social or things like on their website.

14:33And then you've got a retail product. We love it when customers of ours talk about the ingredients that they source. I think within the food space in general, there is transparency around where people are sourcing their flour and their sugar and what kind of sugar and, you know, their chocolate and things like that. We would never force someone to do that. As I said earlier, relationships are such a key part of our business and who we are and why we do what we do. And, you know, we have some customers who talk very openly about the fact that they use us. Sometimes we've got customers who put us on pack, either in the ingredient statements, you got to squint and look and it'll say, you know, guitar and then parenthetical, you know, what our ingredient base is.

15:11Sometimes they say made with guitar on pack, but you know, it's something that we love when it happens. But other times it's, you know, we just kind of know, you know, in the backs of our heads that it's, that we're contributing to the product. I do think it's helpful for, you know, storytelling and things like that. But But I think it also comes down to the brand that's using us and how transparent they want to be about the ingredients that they're sourcing. We hope that our brand resonates with them beyond just a great quality, that the brand values resonate with them. And a lot of times it does.

15:42And that they're excited to share that with their consumers. But, I mean, it's a really good question. I think it's something that I talk a lot about just when I'm engaged. I had a conversation last night at dinner with a friend of mine just talking about that exact thing, menu transparency and what happens when you see a chocolate brand on a dessert menu versus the menu at a bakery, like saying that they use us in a cookie or something. And just the different experience and the right mind that a consumer is in when they see that information. I also think too, like a pan-o-chocolat or a chocolate chip cookie, that to me, I mean, a pen and chocolate and a cookie, I guess I have cookies for breakfast all the time.

16:24It's almost like a sweet treat versus like going out to dinner is a dining experience where you have a drink and dinner and dessert. And so I think the state of mind that someone's in when they are in those two very different experiences also makes for a different acceptance when a brand is referenced, if that makes sense. It does. It does. Everything you've said makes sense. And you're a great communicator and passionate spokesperson for your brand, as you should be. You're the CMO of the company. And you're also a fifth generation member of the Guitard family and the Guitard brand. You have been the CMO for how long now?

17:01I've been at Guitard for about 12 years, 13 years. Yeah, I've always been on the marketing side. We wear a lot of hats. I describe us as like 150 year old startup. So we wear like all sorts of different hats there. But yeah, so I've been doing marketing for a while. So in your current role, do you see yourself as really focused on marketing? Or are you part of sort of the leadership or leadership team of the organization in that you're all kind of driving the brand forward and making decisions about what comes next? Stewards essentially of the brand? Yeah, I'd say the latter. I mean, I think it falls on my shoulders, but we are family business and everyone is involved and helps drive the vision of the company.

17:40And we are small. You know, I think our brand presence on the retail side is, you know, we're national, we're global, but our team is small, our business is small, which makes for a really fun environment to all sort of contribute and collectively work toward a vision and brand vision. You know, I'm responsible for sort of overseeing strategy and making recommendations, but the beauty is that, you know, I've got an amazing marketing team and also just a great leadership team at the company is just really fun group to work with. And we're family business through and through, you know, like, I work with my dad, my brother, my cousins.

18:14But we also, you know, we have employees who've worked for us for multiple generations and who've known me since I was like in the womb, you know, so we have a really fun environment that we work in, you know, no one's sort of making decisions and bulldozing, which is really great. I'm super, super lucky. Yeah, this is what they call a leading question. Did you always want to be part of the family business? Because you spent about a dozen years at Clif Bar. Yeah, no, not that long. Not quite that long. I was there for about six years. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to blame my research team on that one.

18:46So Clif Bar was amazing. No, I worked there right out of college. I went to college here in New York, and then moved right back home to work for my dream company. I knew I always wanted to work in food. I think I always had visions of eventually going to my family business. When I was in college, I was like, do I want to work in the nonprofit side of things? Or do I want to work you know, in food and business. And I knew I wanted to, as cheesy as this sounds, like make a difference and contribute to the world. And I don't think that sounds cheesy. I think that everyone should aspire to at least do something to make the world better.

19:19Yeah. I think when you're an optimistic college graduate, kind of go one of two routes. And then you just become jaded, like a couple of years after that, you're like, okay, nothing's going to change. No, I still believe things will change that we all have the ability to contribute to that. But that's my over-optimized tangent. But no, and then I think I kind of just realized that business was really a route to, you know, doing good in the world. If you can build a good brand and a sound business that makes decisions that aren't just directly related to the bottom line. And Cliff Barr was the epitome of that.

19:52And so I applied before I even graduated from college and they were like, reapply. I got a job and I loved it and it was amazing. And then at the tail end of that. I was in grad school and I was asked to join the family business that we had like a shift. The woman who was handling marketing was leaving and they asked me to join. So I've been there ever since. So it was as much them asking as you wanting to join. Yeah, I think it was sort of a subtle, there had been some discussions, but it was, I think it was just a matter of time. Again, like I knew I wanted to be in food. I knew I wanted to be in business, which is such a specific niche category.

20:29And, you know, I think it was just a matter of time. I think it's hugely important to work outside the family business. And so we kind of have an unspoken rule that, you know, if you're a family member working outside the family business is really, really important. And so I did. Yeah. I imagine working for Cliff Bar. Was Cliff Bar still independent at the time you were working there? Yeah. Yeah. They were at a really exciting time when I was there. There was It was like before, I think my title was web community builder, which basically meant I ran the blog because it was before we were on Facebook, before social media, like before any of that.

21:04And, you know, it was a lifestyle company. Do you remember that website blogger? I do. I mean, what ever happened to blogger? I don't know. I don't know. Whatever happened to LimeWire? LimeWire. LimeWire, the file sharing company? No, it was like how you were able to download music. Yeah, yeah. Oh, and download viruses for your computer as well. Yeah, exactly. That's what happened to it. Anyway. Yeah. So, you know, it was a really cool time where we were just kind of trying to navigate being able to share the products and the lifestyle of the brand. And so I was kind of responsible for online storytelling, communication.

21:41And then then that kind of merged into a whole host of other responsibilities. I was always on the creative sort of digital marketing team. Yeah. And then I moved on to the brand team as well. Did you feel like working for Clif Bar gave you the entrepreneurial foundation to come back home, so to speak, and think about Guitard as an entrepreneurial business or rethinking it more as an entrepreneurial business than it had in the past? I think my dad is an inherently innovative entrepreneurial brain. So I think that's him. I think that's the culture that he's built at Guitard. I think every generation, as you mentioned, I'm the fifth generation.

22:19I feel like every generation has sort of needed to be innovative and needed to be entrepreneurial to pivot and evolve the company to maintain relevance in an ever-changing market. So for sure, I think being at Clif Bar inspired me to think about what motivates me in terms of values at a business. And, you know, I studied design strategy. I got my MBA in design strategy. So I think that that also provided a little bit of a different way of looking at business for me. And I think the combination of the two certainly influences how I look at Guitard. But again, I think that what drives us, that sort of entrepreneurial mindset is not me.

23:00It's the company culture and sort of what has been motivating us. You know, if you look back at our, I forget what year it was. I think it was probably around 2000 when Scharfenberger first sort of came on the market and specialty chocolate, sort of the first wave of, you could say, the craft chocolate movement. Scharfenberger was in our backyard. It was a threat. You know, my dad took it upon himself to figure out a new way of making chocolate. And so that was sort of the start of our super premium line that was targeted for it. It's a Cuvatures, single origins targeted to pastry chefs and confectioners, really premium product.

23:39And that sort of entrepreneurial innovative mindset is a perfect example of how a family business needs to kind of always keep your eye on what's going on and be able to pivot the business. So, yeah, I think it's just inherently who we are. Quick break. If this episode has you thinking about what's next in food and beverage, explore BevNet and Nosh Insider, our subscription platform with deeper insights from the BevNet team. Visit tasteradio.com slash insider to learn more. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who consider their competition as frenemies. They're like, okay, well, we're in the same category.

24:17We're fighting for the same shelf space. We're competing on price as well. I think it's harder to look at your frenemies as threats, though, because you're all, again, trying to lift the category, especially in new and sort of emerging businesses, new emerging food categories or beverage categories. But in the chocolate business, it seems like a threat like Charfer Burger coming into your backyard or coming onto the market is something that you not only have to take seriously, but you have to. It's almost like an entire shift for the company, right? I mean, the whole company has to buy into this new way of doing things and new product lines.

24:57And that's not easy to do. How do you or how did you and your dad and leadership team get buy in from the entire company to recognize that, you know, this without action, that this could be a game changer, not in a good way for your company? Yeah, I mean, I think transparency and open and honest discussions about I love how you refer to it as frenemies. I think that's a better way of saying it than a threat. It sounds so significant. You know, just kind of like looking at what's happening in the market and not just within chocolate, right? Like you're giving an example and I gave an example of like a really unique experience of, you know, Scharferberg was in Berkeley.