Li-Lac Chocolates is Rolling with the Punches this Holiday Season
By Anthony Paradiso
“We always say ‘winter is coming’ and you’re either ready for it or you’re not.” – Chris Taylor, co-owner of Li-Lac Chocolates
According to leverageedu.com, ‘winter is coming’ is an idiom that serves as “a reminder and warning that something bad is about to happen or that some hardships or challenges are on the way and are inevitable.” For Li-Lac Chocolates co-owner Chris Taylor and everyone at Manhattan’s oldest chocolate house, ‘winter’ is the holiday season rush. The holiday season rush means making 1,000-plus gift boxes a day during Christmas to satisfy the world’s craving for “small batch chocolates made with old-world techniques” as the slogan on their website reads.
This year has already been challenging as the price of cocoa has more than doubled since the beginning of 2024, according to ABC 7 News. Taylor said that Li-Lac has been “cutting costs” to deal with the rising price of chocolate and that the current market is the “new normal.” What isn’t normal is the holiday season beginning with Halloween, but luckily Li-Lac is prepared for that.
“Halloween is fairly easy but then Thanksgiving comes a few weeks later and Christmas comes a few weeks after that, so those last ten weeks of the year are one big logistical nightmare but that’s just the nature of the business. As soon as Easter’s over, you start doing your production plan—thinking ahead, buying supplies for those last ten weeks of the year. You plan your production schedule in detail because if you don’t think everything through you’ll never get through those ten weeks,” said Taylor.
One thing that sets Li-Lac apart is its variety of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) which include all their holiday products such as molds, gift boxes and counter chocolates.
“Let’s say a gift box has 20 different chocolate items. Each and every single one of them has to go right,” said Taylor. “Let’s say you’re planning to make 20,000 gift boxes in those last two months. That’s a few thousand dollars every week. You have to plan your inputs, which have to be fresh—you can’t pre-make those—very carefully so it’s like a fine-tuned machine where nothing can go wrong. You don’t think of that when you’re making chocolate but it’s a basically a huge logistical and planning operation.”
For Halloween, Li-Lac sells a ghoulish assortment of molds which include pumpkins, witches, ghosts, skulls and bats. Taylor says that Halloween and Thanksgiving are easier holidays to plan for than Christmas because the only departments involved are molding and packaging. When they sell gift boxes around Christmas and Hanukkah, the kitchen gets involved to make the caramel, marzipan, and other ingredients that go into the individual chocolates inside a gift box.
This year Thanksgiving will be on Thursday, Nov. 28 which means there will be fewer days in between Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah. For Li-Lac, this means less time to transition from producing fresh turkey molds to Santa Claus and dreidel molds. Thanksgiving is fun according to Taylor because it involves making “gazillions” of chocolate turkeys which only vary in size. For example, you can purchase a giant chocolate turkey which weighs 14 pounds all the way down to their smallest option, a bunch of miniature premium chocolate foiled turkeys which weigh 3/8 of an ounce each.
The business landscape is always changing. A few years ago there was a chocolate shortage, which had a negative effect on business for Li-Lac and chocolate companies everywhere. This year, Li-Lac’s sales were slow for the first half of 2024, but over the last several months internet sales have been doing “incredibly well.” The other aspect of Li-Lac that’s been steadily improving is its expansion. Recently, Li-Lac opened two new replacement stores inside Hudson Yards and Grand Central Terminal.
Taylor described why having a good relationship with their landlords led to them being able to move to better locations inside these marketplaces. “I believe one of our key competitive strengths is just good relationships with the landlord. It seems like in New York, everyone’s fighting with their landlord but to me, that just doesn’t make sense. If you have good relations with them and an opening comes up and they’re like ‘why don’t you guys move in here’ and if it’s a better location then your sales go up. A lot of it just depends on relationships and credibility. We got amazing opportunities at Grand Central and at Hudson Yards and it’s all because we don’t fight with our landlords. We focus on relationships and to me, that’s such an important variable and I don’t understand why more people don’t do that.”
In addition, Li-Lac is rebuilding its current store in Industry City, Brooklyn and its new distribution center went into full operation on Oct. 21. Taylor explained that Li-Lac could have moved to areas of the country where the rent is cheaper and saved a lot of money. However, they are Manhattan’s oldest chocolate house and moving out of the five boroughs after 100 years of business just wasn’t in their DNA.
“We thought about doing it in Pennsylvania, like so many other people have done. Everybody’s moved to northeast Pennsylvania and we could’ve probably saved a lot of money. What it came down to is we’re Manhattan’s oldest chocolate house and we just didn’t want to leave the state so we decided to just double up our bets on Brooklyn. I mean to have 20,000 square feet in Manhattan would’ve been astronomically expensive but at least in Brooklyn we have a cost effective solution thanks to the Economic Development Commission (EDC). We just didn’t want to move to northeast Pennsylvania like so many other people have done. We’re paying a price for that but it’s also that we’re closer to market so we can respond faster.”
It’s good news for Brooklyn and Manhattan that Li-Lac Chocolates isn’t moving because they generate jobs and, most of all, focus on the relationships it has with the village community which is going on 101 years strong.
Visit Li-Lac’s Village locations at 75 Greenwich Ave. and 162 Bleecker Street and try some of their Thanksgiving themed chocolate or have a mint patty which my mother loved!
