You can't miss the gleaming gold organ pipes stretching toward the ceiling. It's right in the center of Albert Hall, the renovated theater in Brussels, Belgium, where Godiva is hosting its 90th anniversary party. It looks just like something you'd see in a Tim Burton reproduction of Willy Wonka, only in place of a keyboard, there's a row of perfume-bottle puffers. Squeeze one, and it releases a scent found in one of Godiva's chocolates. The one on the right smells like freshly sliced oranges. That one on the left releases a wave of Turkish hazelnuts. Suddenly, you're unsure if you're some place real.
This "Aroma Organ" is Godiva's version of edible wallpaper. ("Who ever heard of a snozzberry?!") It's Godiva's way of making you see an everyday item in a truly magical way. But it also serves a surprisingly practical purpose: It's to show people just how much scent affects how something tastes.
"The light is dimmed down, and I'm trying to focus your one sense on that experience," explains Thierry Muret, Godiva's executive chief chocolatier.
This is how the executives at Godiva think about chocolate. And they're backed by Oxford University's research that explains how your other senses affect what you eat—and how much you enjoy what you're eating. Essentially, if you want the snozzberries to taste like snozzberries, they've got to smell like snozzberries first.
That lesson is the theme of the night, extending past the organ and into the next room. At the center of the 2,625-square foot ballroom (which comfortably holds cocktails for 800) are six cubicle-sized gold boxes topped with brown ribbons. As you step inside each one, you try a different chocolate and take part in a social experiment of sorts—one that heightens, alters, or simply cuts off one of your five senses. One involves eating a truffle around a campfire in total darkness (the faux-fire, too, dying out as the lights went out).
In another, you sample the Lady Noir, a dark chocolate praline that gives way to a creamy, white chocolate center, in a room that changed from YouTube play button-red to navy blazer-blue with each bite.
"Even though it's the same taste, when the lights turn blue, the bitter notes [in the chocolate] come through," explains Michelle Chin, head of marketing and global development for Godiva North America. For most people, when you eat something red—or served in something red—you'll think it's sweeter than it actually is. Change the packaging, and the flavor changes completely—as Coca-Cola learned when it released limited-edition white cans and received a wave of complaints that their secret recipe had to have changed.
"It's really important for us to consider not just culinary trends, but look at what influences a person's tastes across the board, even psychologically," Chin says.
Welcome to the wild—and possibly over-the-top—fantasy world that is Godiva. There are no lollipop trees or rivers of chocolate (a sanitation hazard, reportedly), but what really goes on at the chocolatier is every bit as fantastic as the tales Roald Dahl whipped up.
For most of the global population, there are four seasons. In the world of Godiva—at least its North American division—there are five: Valentine's Day, Spring/Easter, Mother's Day/Summer, Fall and Holiday. These are the top times of year when people seek out sweets, and each represents a key opportunity to bring something new to market.
The design process starts a little differently than when Pierre Draps launched the brand in 1926. Back then, he would create chocolates while his wife Eugénie imagined "packaging that was so ornate, Brussels families would divert their evening walks to admire them" in Godiva's windows, writes the company's CEO, Mohamed Elsarky, in the brand's 90th anniversary commemorative book, A Legacy in Chocolate.
Nowadays, things are a little more corporate. When the product innovation team learned that people were as obsessed with the consistency of a chocolate as much as they were its flavor, Godiva's chefs started experimenting with layering textures in its sweets."It's no longer just a simple, milk chocolate caramel," Chin says. "Consumers want a range of textures—smooth, chewy, and crunchy."
That led to one of Muret's latest creations, the Mousse Meringue: a chocolate filled with fluffy, smooth mousse wrapped around a crisp meringue center.
"I'm a big follower of fashion, so I'll often look to the runway and interior design to get a feel of where things are going," Muret says. "Color combinations can give me ideas of flavor combinations, to pair this fruit with that one, and see what happens."
The whole process of designing a new collection of chocolates takes about 18 months, with the longest part being the least exciting—making sure the chocolate adheres to federal regulations for every country it's going to be sold in, says chef chocolatier Philippe Dau. But once the flavor, texture and overall look seems right, they'll test the chocolate with consumers. If they love it, the recipe is ready to be "commercialized," or adjusted to go from a small-batch serving to one that can be mass-produced in either or both of Godiva's plants (one in Brussels, one in Reading, PA). If they don't, it's back to the beginning.
Eventually, though, the design is ready for full-scale production, a process Godiva rarely lets the average Charlie Bucket see—until now.
When you walk inside Godiva's factory in Brussels, you might think you've accidentally stumbled into the lobby of a swanky Belgian hotel. It has a modern vibe, with white walls, frosted glass, a dark wood accent wall, and a lush bouquet of flowers to keep it from feeling too sterile.
But that welcoming feeling changes dramatically when you enter the double doors and walk up a set of stairs to the heart of the plant itself. Things get serious. Gone are the jazzy elevator music and carefully arranged orchids. Here, all you hear is the soft buzzing of machines. All you see is a strict adherence to food safety: stainless steel, white walls, sensible brown linoleum-esque floors. Everything can be easily wiped down and sanitized, and it is—including every person who enters.
In order to enter, you must put on a disposable white jacket, hair net, beard guard, shoe guards (heavy-duty shower caps for your feet)—and you have to solemnly swear you don't have a series of diseases (typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery, as well as the flu, acute gastroenteritis, Hepatitis A or any contagious skin disease). All jewelry had to be removed, and if you were wearing nail polish, you had to wear a pair of plastic gloves while inside the facility. After you've double-washed your hands. It's clear that this place is a lab—it's not Candy Land.
Godiva follows a hand-washing procedure that is basically a car wash for your body: walk across a conveyor belt of rotating blue scrubbing brushes that clean your shoes while passing through a turnstile, pausing only to stick your arms, elbow-deep, in a massive white machine that dispenses soap, then another that squirts out hand sanitizer. If the machine lights up green, you good to go on; if it doesn't, you're deemed a bad nut and go down the trash chute, like all other bad nuts. (Just kidding—it just means you didn't trigger the sensor to release the hand sanitizer. Try, try again.)
To an outsider, the factory doesn't have a clear order. On the left, a group of women sit at stainless steel tables, hand-decorating the chocolate feather that tops every Signature Lait. It's a ganache designed back in 1939 for the Gone With the Wind movie premiere that looks kind of like the hat Scarlett O'Hara wears in the film—and one of the nine signature pieces in the brand's 90th anniversary collection.
Then there's an assembly line, where small squares of crushed, caramelized pecans are being enrobed in chocolate, then decorated with crunchy chocolate bits or a diagonal swoosh, and to the right, appearing completely unattended, is a pipe spouting chocolate into a constantly swirling basin. It's the sort of sight that tugs at your inner Augustus Gloop, making you want to face-plant right into the machine.
Godiva's chocolates are primarily made in one of two ways. The first is enrobing, which essentially involves pouring a waterfall of melted chocolate over a formed center (like caramel) as it rolls down an assembly line. The second is shell-molding, where melted chocolate is poured into a mold and the excess dumped out. The shell that's left is filled and released from its mold.
At the same time the chefs are working on their chocolates, the packaging design team members are wrapping their brains around them—literally. Their whole objective is to create a box so appealing you'll look up from your phone while walking down the street (or cruising the mall) and wander into a Godiva boutique.
"The consumer has to love the design," Chin says, and the company will go back to the drawing board as many times as it takes to get the design just right. After all, if you taste with all five senses, what you see has got to be as good as what you eat.
Since food has become such a visual medium in recent years—can you scroll past five posts on Facebook or Instagram without seeing what someone's eating?—the brand's added another prong to its design process: Scanning social media after a product launch to gauge people's reactions.
"Social media is a tool to understand what patrons are saying," Muret explains. That feedback can help the brand pivot quickly, making it easier to test new ways to work with chocolate beyond the typical truffle. Case in point: Soft serve isn't exactly an avant garde dessert, but it is Instagram gold. Two years ago, Godiva launched its own take on the ice cream truck classic, creating an international hit that's become a year-round staple in China. (Fun fact: 80 percent of the ice cream sold is the classic soft-serve swirl, only Godiva's features a mix of dark chocolate and white chocolate vanilla bean.)
"We're always looking at how to have that rich, Godiva experience in new ways," Chin says. Godiva execs have stayed mum about what new releases may be in store for the brand, but the inspiration for its next hit could be in your newsfeed right now. You may not have a golden ticket, but you apparently wield a lot more power in this factory than you think.
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