In 2017 Cadbury told Dunedin it was done making chocolate here, and a small bean-to-bar outfit on Roberts Street went out with a share offer to build a proper factory instead. It filled in weeks, funded in small parcels by people who mostly just did not want to live in a city that had stopped making chocolate. Nine years on the roaster is still going, the beans come from the Solomons and Samoa, and several thousand Dunedinites can accurately claim to own a chocolate factory.
The Year Dunedin Nearly Lost Its Chocolate
A Factory Closure That Landed Personally
Most cities lose a factory and it is a paragraph in the business pages. When Cadbury said it was pulling manufacturing out of Dunedin, it stayed on the front page here for weeks and then kept turning up in conversations that had nothing to do with confectionery.
Part of that was jobs, obviously. Part of it was that the purple building had been quietly doing its thing at the top of town for generations, and half the people in this city had been through it on a school trip and come out holding a warm bar.
You do not really notice a thing like that until someone tells you it is leaving. Then you notice everything about it – the smell on the right sort of day, the fact that when people elsewhere thought about Dunedin, chocolate was one of the three things they mentioned.
The Share Offer Nobody Expected To Work
What happened instead was a share offer. A small local outfit already making bean-to-bar chocolate went out with an equity crowdfunding raise, which in New Zealand means a licensed platform, a disclosure document, and rules enforced by the Financial Markets Authority – not a tip jar with better branding.
The pitch was not sentimental. Buy in, own a piece, help fund a factory that can actually make things at volume. The parcels were small enough that a person on an ordinary Dunedin wage could take one without thinking about it for a fortnight.
It filled in weeks. Not by one benefactor writing a cheque, but by thousands of people putting in the sort of money you would otherwise spend on a decent night out, over and over, until the target was gone.
What Stubbornness Looks Like On A Spreadsheet
It would be easy to write this up as a business-success story, and it is not really one. Most of the people who bought in were not making an investment decision in any serious sense. They were voting.
A share register with thousands of names on it, most of them holding parcels too small to ever matter financially, is not a capital structure. It is a city saying no thanks to the version of events where the chocolate goes away.
Dunedin does this occasionally. It is the same instinct that keeps a stadium argument running for a decade and gets a community hall re-roofed by people who do not use it. Not enthusiasm exactly – something more bloody-minded than that.
Ten Roberts Street On A Work Day
You Smell It Before You See The Sign
Roberts Street is not a destination. It is a short run of working buildings about a kilometre from the railway station, the sort of block you drive through on the way to somewhere else, and there is nothing about the frontage at number ten that announces itself.
The smell does that instead. On a day when the roaster is going you get it half a block out – not the sweet supermarket-aisle version but something darker and more like coffee, slightly bitter at the edges, which is what cacao actually smells like before sugar gets involved.
Inside it is a factory that has had a shop and a tasting room fitted around it, rather than a visitor attraction with a token bit of machinery out the back. There are pallets. There are people in hairnets moving trays. We like it better for that.
Inside The CHOCtagon
The tasting space goes by the CHOCtagon, which is exactly the sort of pun this city deserves and has stopped apologising for. It is where the self-guided tasting journey happens – twenty-five dollars for an adult, sessions running every half hour, and you work your way along a tasting sheet from raw bean forward.
The bean is the bit that catches people out. Chewing a cacao nib with nothing added to it is a genuinely confronting experience, closer to a bitter nut than anything you would call chocolate, and it reframes everything you taste afterwards.
Time it for a weekday if you can. The crafters work Monday to Friday, so that is when the machines are running and the floor has people on it. Weekends you can still see through to the factory, but you are looking at a room that has knocked off for the week.
The Shop Is Small And That Is The Point
You do not have to pay anything to walk into the factory shop, and plenty of people never do the tasting at all – they come in for a bar and leave four minutes later. The hours are short and honest about it: Monday to Saturday, from ten in the morning until early afternoon, which is the schedule of a place that is primarily making chocolate rather than selling it.
The shelf is a single wall. Bars, a few moulded things, drinking chocolate, whatever has just come off the line and gone straight out front, which is why the shop occasionally has something the online store does not.
There is no cafe attached, no seating, no upsell. Somebody weighs your bag, tells you which of the new bars is worth your time, and that is the transaction.
Beans, And Where They Actually Come From
Grown In The Pacific, Crafted Here
The sourcing is the argument, and it is worth being clear about why. A small maker cannot compete on price and should not try, so the only ground worth standing on is knowing exactly where the beans came from and what the people who grew them got for them.
The beans come out of the South Pacific rather than West Africa. Solomon Islands cacao sits under the milk chocolate, which is built on a fifty-two percent base and runs to caramel and a bit of vanilla at the finish. There is Samoan cacao in the seventy percent range.
It also means the bars taste of somewhere. Cacao picks up its growing region the way wine does, which is the whole reason single-origin is a phrase anybody bothers with, and it is the difference you notice on the tasting sheet.
What Bean-To-Bar Actually Involves
Bean-to-bar is one of those terms that has been worn smooth by marketing, so here is what it means on the floor at Roberts Street. Everything from sack to wrapper happens in that building.
The beans get roasted, which is where the smell comes from and where most of the flavour is decided. Then they are cracked and winnowed – the husk blown off, the nib kept – and ground down over hours until the grit disappears and what was a coarse paste turns liquid.
Conching is the long, boring, essential part: hours of grinding and aeration that makes the difference between chocolate that is fine and chocolate that is smooth. Then tempering, a fussy business of heating and cooling to get the crystal structure right, and finally moulding.
Slow, physical, unglamorous work, done in batches small enough that one bad roast costs you real money.
The Bars Worth Arguing About
The range moves around, which is half the fun of the shelf, but a few things have earned their place and generate strong opinions among people we know.
– The seventy percent Pacific bars, which are the house argument – straight chocolate with nowhere to hide
– Salted caramel, with actual sea-salted chunks in it rather than a flavouring
– Short black, for the people who think coffee improves everything, and they are not wrong
– Horopito and kawakawa, which is the one to hand a visitor – peppery, herbal, and unmistakably from here
– Cinnamon scroll, a recent arrival that tastes disconcertingly like the bakery item
There are chocolate fish in both milk and seventy percent, which is a small act of national service, and a sugar-free drinking chocolate that holds up on a Dunedin night in July.
What A Chocolate Factory Is For
Owned By People Who Live Here
The ownership is not a marketing line that got left up after the campaign ended. Thousands of shareholders, most of them local, most holding parcels worth less than a decent set of tyres – and they are still on the register, still getting updates, still telling people at parties that they own a chocolate factory.
It changes how the place behaves. There is a fundraising programme aimed at schools and clubs, which is the kind of low-margin, high-hassle work a company with proper investors would have quietly killed off years ago. There is sponsorship money going out the door in a city where most sponsorship money comes from somewhere else.
The pressure runs the other way too. A shareholder who lives in Mornington will tell you to your face if the new bar is not up to much.
The Long Game
OCHO likes to point out that Dunedin has been making chocolate for more than a century and a half, which is a claim with a bit of self-interest baked into it but is also true. The city has form here. What changed is the scale – from an operation that employed hundreds to one that fits in a warehouse on a side street.
Nobody at Roberts Street pretends the hard part is over. Small-batch manufacturing in a country at the end of every supply line is a grind, cacao prices have been brutal, and the talk of a new factory has been talk for a while now.
But the chocolate is being made, in this city, from beans somebody can name, by a company that thousands of Dunedinites own a sliver of. That was not the obvious outcome of the year Cadbury left.
There is a version of this city that let the chocolate go, shrugged, and got on with something else. It was the likelier version, and it did not happen because a few thousand people put small amounts of money into a thing they wanted to keep existing. That is not a business strategy anyone would recommend, but it worked, and the proof of it is a smell coming off a warehouse a kilometre from the railway station on any weekday you care to walk past.