Retiring engineer living his Chocollor chocolate dream

Carl Sharpe considers himself a late arrival to the world of entrepreneurship.

At 61, the father of five adult children and a mechanical engineer, who is about to retire from a 40-year practice in that profession, is building a promising chocolate-making business and fulfilling a long-held dream to be a manufacturer.

Over the next year, he intends to move full time into his new vocation, with plans to expand the small enterprise, which he and his family started as a hobby seven years ago.

“I wanted to make something value added with Jamaican raw materials, and after looking around, I figured agro-processing was the best bet,” said Sharpe, recalling the genesis of the business idea.

He admits to being a chocolate lover, who for some time has been toying with the idea of chocolate-making. The nudge into realising his chocolate dream, after years of hesitation, came down to his health.

“I had settled on chocolate-making for some time now and had been researching the topic extensively for years. However, in 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer and I decided that I was not going to die before making chocolate,” Sharpe told the Financial Gleaner in an interview at his Kingston office.

He enrolled in an online chocolate-making course and spoke with a former employee of the defunct Highgate Chocolate factory in Jamaica ,who shared information how to set up a chocolate-making plant.

The businessman also had a lot of encouragement from family members, with his 18-year-old daughter, Jamaica’s top-ranked national cyclist and triathlete Llori Sharpe, for whom Chocollor is named, leading the pack.

In fact, Llori, a sport science student, has been his unofficial publicist and market development officer of sorts, who tested the first rudimentary products – chocolate bites – on her friends in high school a few years ago.

“When she told me that her friends liked it and wanted more, I realised I was on to something,” Sharpe said. He registered the business name with the Companies Office of Jamaica in 2015, but only started selling the products commercially in February of this year.

Big break

Beset in the initial stages of developing the idea by a lack of information on the chocolate manufacturing process, Sharpe finally got a break when he saw the product being made elsewhere in the Caribbean. In Trinidad, where he did engineering work, he hit the information jackpot when he discovered the Cocoa Research Centre at the St Augustine campus of The University of the West Indies.

The entrepreneur says success has come only after several setbacks. He recalled that his earliest cocoa-roasting experiment utilising a big Dutch pot, was not very encouraging.

“In the very early stages using the Dutch pot, I asked a friend to taste the finished product and to be brutally honest with me. She said: ‘Carl, I think you’re trying to kill somebody’,” he joked.

Armed with that “encouragement”, he said he went back to the drawing board to find a more controlled method of roasting.

Sharpe now makes fine-flavoured, premium dark, milk and white chocolate bites and bars from 100 per cent Jamaican-grown cocoa beans at his home-based processing facility in St Andrew. He is now relocating manufacturing from his kitchen to what he says is a modified location at home, with assessment and guidance from the Jamaica Business Development Centre, JBDC.

The raw material is bought mainly from cocoa farmers in the Peckham area of Clarendon, Mount Regale in St Mary, and from the agriculture ministry’s export division. His product is differentiated, Sharpe says, from other mass-produced imported chocolates that are made from bulk chocolate sourced from places like Madagascar, Hawaii, and several Central American countries.

The small manufacturer accepts that he is operating in a niche market which has significant room for growth, and says he is not perturbed by competition from imported or locally made chocolates.

With a low sugar-added content and no preservatives, Chocollor chocolates are said to have a guaranteed shelf life of 18 months, even though they have been tested to remain fresh for over two years.

The products are mainly available through Things Jamaican stores at Jamaica’s international airports and at Devon House in Kingston. A St Andrew-based pharmacy and gift shop also came on board recently as a distributor; and a long-term customer located in Montego Bay utilises the products as part of its gifts sets.

The next phase of development will involve a greater marketing and distribution push to get Chocollor chocolates into mainstream supermarkets, pharmacies and shops. The product is also marketed on social media and at various expos, which provide direct sales.

So far, the small entrepreneur has invested about $3 million in the business, out of pocket, for equipment and raw materials. In 2017, the start-up received a $70,000 Voucher for Technical Assistance grant from the Development Bank of Jamaica.

Significant business development support has come from the JBDC, which provided Sharpe with business management training and has done design and production of the labelling and packaging materials. The JBDC also offered training in entrepreneurial sales and investment pitch.

In the first few years of operation, Chocollor was focussed on cost recovery and with some refinement of costing, has started to see some profits, to the tune of about 20 per cent of sales, Sharpe says. Production and sales are about to enter the business’ peak season around Christmas, New Year and Valentine’s Day.

Chocollor’s immediate expansion plans include the re-investment of about $2.5 million in revenues to acquire more refining and mixing equipment. So far, most of the business expenditure has gone to buying refiners, juicers and roasters from overseas, as well as raw materials.

Next up for the businessman will be the construction of a dedicated processing plant on the Sharpe’s residential property and the employment of staff, particularly to assist with wrapping. Currently, all processing and wrapping is done by Sharpe and members of his family, including his wife, Donna-Kaye.

Of the business and its future, the small entrepreneur says: “It is something that I love and I think it can be quite profitable. I like the challenge, and my daughter and my wife are equally enthused about the business.”

Sharpe adds that his love for making things and his business interest are qualities he picked up from his late father, who was a mechanic and trucker in Troy, in Trelawny, where he grew up.

He believes, too, that his 91-year-old mother, a former teacher, is happy that through his chocolate-making enterprise, he is finally utilising the knowledge he learned about chemistry in high school at Munro College in St Elizabeth.

huntley.medley@gleanerjm.com