It was #NationalChocolateWeek and it seemed only right that we should have a presentation from a local businesswoman aka the Chocolate Gourmet to our Telford & Wrekin WiRE networking meeting in October.
Janette Rowlett opened her first shop in Ludlow nearly 19 years ago after she took a year out of her career to research what she wanted to do with the rest of her working life.
Her travels took her all over the world where she fell in love with the idea of selling really high quality chocolate. In those days there were very few dedicated chocolate shops and she has remained true to her idea of being a truly customer focussed specialist retailer. Janette opened her second shop in Shrewsbury in 2004 and now also trades on line.
Another one of her USP’s is to ensure all her staff have excellent product knowledge and Janette certainly demonstrated her own expertise. She explained how the plants are grown and harvested as well as the history of chocolate and what different chocolate tastes like.
Here are some fun facts that we learned in our ‘tutored tasting’, sampling chocolate that had from 32% to 100% cocoa – bearing in mind that Cadbury’s Dairy Milk has just 26%.
Janette was certainly a chocolate expert and admits she was blessed with a good palette, she is determined to remain a quality retailer offering nearly 100 different bars of chocolate from her shops supplying chocolate bars, gifts, truffles and cooking packs worldwide from her website.
We certainly enjoyed the samples and felt we had fully embraced #NationalChocolateWeek!
Blog written by Kim Gilmour, Network Leader, Telford & Wrekin WiRE