Chocolate brand to change recipes, making treats safer for more shoppers

WPTZ

By Jack Thurston

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    COLCHESTER, Vermont (WPTZ) — A Vermont chocolate maker is celebrating a quarter-century in business, and is expanding on its promise to consumers. Vermont Nut Free Chocolates is making a new pledge to redesign certain recipes to remove an additional allergen — eggs — to ensure even more people with often-serious food allergies can consumer its treats in 2024.

“We were peanut-freest ones to be and tree nut-free on purpose,” recalled Mark Elvidge, the president and CEO of Vermont Nut Free Chocolates, which just marked 25 years in business. “It’s gone by, you know, pretty quick!”

Founded by the parents of a son with a serious nut allergy, manufacturing moved from the Champlain Islands to larger space in Colchester several years ago, as Vermont Nut Free Chocolates found steady growth over the years.

Researchers have said roughly 2% of American children have peanut allergies, along with more than 4.5-million adults.

“A lot of these families have had incidents where something has happened where they’ve eaten something, or their child has eaten something that they shouldn’t have had – probably by accident, someplace where it wasn’t labeled or they didn’t know it was inside of the product,” explained Courtney Schatz, the general manager of the chocolate company. “And they can end up at the hospital. I mean, it’s very, very scary. So if we can guarantee them that that’s not going to happen when they’re enjoying our stuff, then that’s a big deal for them.”

The gourmet creations from Vermont Nut Free Chocolates are produced in a facility promised to be not just peanut free, but also free of tree nuts like almonds and pecans. There is no coconut or sesame in the facility, either, Elvidge noted.

“The free-from market is a growing category,” Elvidge said in an interview with NBC5 News. “More and more stores are giving more space to the free-from category.”

Elvidge said Vermont Nut Free Chocolates is adding to its list of more than 200 allergy-friendly items for wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales. Examples of recent product extensions include hot cocoa bombs and chocolate cups filled with sunflower butter.

The company’s announcement that it will go entirely egg-free in 2024 will remove from recipes another of the most common food allergens. When redesigning any recipes that currently contain eggs, the company is promising to be mindful of ensuring taste and texture are not negatively impacted by the removal of that ingredient, leaders said.

“People are now making much more informed choices about the types of products that they eat,” observed Sebastiaan Gorissen, a digital marketing professor at St. Michael’s College.

Gorissen said he views Vermont Nut Free Chocolates’ laser focus on food safety as a source of business strength. He predicted shoppers who make choices based on what can be a life-or-death medical issue will be much more fiercely loyal to the brand than a casual chocolate buyer would.

“It allows you to really embed your brand into those consumers’ lives, their daily routines,” Gorissen told NBC5 News. “Now, they might buy your chocolate every month, every week, every day if they are a chocolate lover, and have them come back to you for years, decades, of their lives.”

While allergies or dietary restrictions are what usually have people discovering Vermont Nut Free Chocolates for one specific member of a family, the company said it takes it as a huge compliment when the rest of the household then reaches for the label.

“It’s not very long until the entire family decides they like Vermont Nut Free Chocolates better than anything else they’ve ever had in their house,” Elvidge said.

In addition to the announced move to go egg-free in 2024, Gorissen said he sees two other opportunities for Vermont Nut Free Chocolates to strengthen its relationship with customers. He pointed to Vermont’s reputation for high-quality food manufacturing and the fact the company is made up of nearly 90 percent women as two areas where the brand could tell its story in ways that appeal broadly to many shoppers, aside from those interested solely in the core message about the ingredients list having no food allergens.

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