From the Chocolate Vault · Case 4
A flying visit to Tasmania
All that work, undone in the final few kilometres.
It was a Wednesday afternoon when a client rang. “How would you like a trip to Tasmania? Tomorrow. Six o’clock flight. You’re back on the last flight out.”
“So what sights will I be seeing?”
“A reefer full of Easter chocolate.”
The Easter bunny was in trouble
The refrigerated container had reached the transport depot with the whole Easter consignment for one of my client’s outlets, in good condition. Then someone at the yard unloaded it onto an open-top truck for the last leg, on one of the hottest days of the Tasmanian summer.
Easter was close and there was no time to make and ship replacements. My job was to give a professional opinion on the condition of the chocolate: what could still be sold, and what had to be written off.
Not all heat damage is obvious
Some of it was: hollow eggs had collapsed as the chocolate softened. But chocolate doesn’t have to lose its shape to be damaged. Heat can partly disrupt the tempered cocoa butter crystals, and when the chocolate cools they recrystallise differently, bringing bloom, loss of gloss and a change in texture.
And much of it was foil-wrapped. Foil makes Easter products look wonderful and does an equally good job of hiding the chocolate underneath. The foil had to come off samples before I could judge anything.
The pallet problem
Normally, where a carton sits on a pallet tells you about its heat exposure: the outside cartons take it first, and the ones in the centre are insulated. But these cartons had been moved and restacked several times, so that evidence was gone.
I couldn’t assume the centre cartons were good or the outside ones bad. Every product type, from all over the consignment, had to be sampled. It made for a long day.
The final reckoning
About 60% of the consignment was written off. Not because of the manufacturing, the tempering or my client’s cold chain. The product reached the depot in good condition. It was the last few kilometres.
Think what goes into one Easter egg: cocoa, sugar and milk from around the world, machinery from specialist engineers across the globe, and farmers, technicians, production and quality teams, warehouse and transport crews. Months of work, all for one morning and a child peeling back the foil. And 60% of it went to the scrap heap because of an open-top truck.
The lesson: the cold chain is only as good as its weakest link
Looking after chocolate doesn’t stop at the factory door. A short spell of uncontrolled heat does damage a cool room won’t undo: once the crystal structure has been disrupted, cooling again doesn’t necessarily bring back the gloss, snap or stability.
And you can’t replace Easter stock after Easter. This was entirely preventable: someone only needed to think about what they were carrying.
As for Tasmania? I saw the airport, a warehouse, an awful lot of Easter chocolate, and the airport again. Not quite the sightseeing tour I’d imagined.
In short
Mark Tubman, ChocCreator
Sometimes the impulse tasks have the greatest impact →