Mail Order Chocolate

Once our chocolate is made and wrapped, and it is time to send it to gift recipients by mail order. Chocolate is a very seasonal business, so we will ship a small number of packages per day in July or August, and many, many thousands of chocolates by mail order each day in December. Here is how the shipping process works:

We use computers that run our own proprietary software to schedule order shipments electronically with Fedex. These computers talk to Fedex's computers every 10 minutes, and status is exchanged with Fedex on every package we are about to ship, as well as every package they have in their network. Once we know which orders are going to ship, we print them out at stations that look like this:

The shipping labels are printed on a form together with a greeting card message at the top. This means that we will keep your gift card message together with the shipping label, and helps us reduce errors here to fewer than one order in 10,000:

When the gift message is placed on top of the chocolate box, the final product looks like this:

In the winter, we pack it in ice with foam:

Then we apply the shipping label to the box:

Run the box through the taping machine to seal it tightly for mail order:

It comes off the taping machine and goes down a ramp to be palletized:

And we load the boxes onto pallets to wait for the shipping carriers:

Note that if we don't load them on pallets, this is what can happen. In this image, we blocked the Fedex driver's face and screened out the shipping labels, as she was disciplined by Fedex for loading her truck like this. It's a little unusual for a company to show something like this, but this is the type of logistics issue that chocolate companys have from time to time. And we find them and correct them as soon as they occur! (It's also why we use padding in our packaging)