A Wealth of Chocolate Wisdom
It takes four generations to make chocolate this delicious.
The Chocolate Dynasty
In 1850, Eugenius Callebaut opened a brewery in Wieze, Belgium. His son carried on the family business but in 1911 also opened a chocolate factory. His son apprenticed with Chocolaterie Meunier in Paris then returned to run the factory. In time, his son too guided the factory’s continued growth.
Bear with us here. Just one more generation to go.
The next son to be born into this chocolate dynasty was a mischievous boy who treated the factory as an extension of his bedroom. He played there. Worked there. And learned all the secrets.
That little boy, with his inherited wealth of chocolate wisdom and a penchant for innovation, eventually moved to Canada, where he founded his own chocolate factory in Calgary, Alberta.
His name? Bernard Callebaut.
A Fresh Start in the New World
Along with the wisdom passed down through five generations of European master chocolatiers, Bernard inherited a penchant for innovation. He chose to start his own venture rather than pilot the Callebaut family’s prosperous chocolate factory in Belgium.
The family agreed to sell it in 1980. Since then it’s continued growing. Today it processes 15% of the world’s cocoa bean supply. Annual sales exceed $3 billion.
Yet Bernard has no regrets. He earned a university degree in electro-mechanical engineering, completed a business management course in Switzerland, and worked as an unpaid apprentice to one of Europe’s great chocolatiers: Rene Goossens, of Antwerp.
“Then I came to Canada for a fresh start,” explains Bernard. “I visited cities from Los Angeles to Montreal. Calgary appealed to me because of the Rocky Mountains and the wonderful sense of space.”
“Europeans Thought I was Crazy”
“Europeans thought I was crazy to open a gourmet chocolate company for people whose only experience with chocolate was cheap candy bars,” explains Bernard. “But I always brought samples with me to North America. Everyone loved them.”
Bernard opened his first Calgary store on 17th Avenue SW. At the end of day one, there was $700 in the till. He did $200,000 in business that year, then doubled it the next.
|
