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Local candy-maker Chocolate Barr’s newest expansion has inspired a little bit of nostalgia for Derek Barr.
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Located at 658 Erie St, the popular retailer’s soon-to-be-opened factory will be housed in the same building where Barr’s dad worked at the former Coca-Cola bottling plant.
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“It had a lot of nice, fun memories for me from my youth, and we’re just excited to be kind of moving this into the next stage,” said Barr, who owns the candy company with his wife Jacqueline.
“I got my first hockey stick as a kid here at a Christmas party. It t was very, very close-knit group of people that worked at Coca-Cola at the time,” he added.
Beyond those warm childhood memories, the decision to purchase the site was also a long time coming for the 23-year-old business. After moving from their former location on Ontario Street to George Street in 2014, it did not take them long to realize they needed more space.
“We very quickly ran out of production space. Shat that means is, it became very difficult for us to be able to maintain our level of our capacity of making the candies and chocolates for customers in the space that we were in,” Barr said.
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While Barr is never one to complain and looks at challenges as “an opportunity to do something,” the limitations of their current space meant they had to limit what products they produced during the holiday season, which is their busiest time of year.
With a need to focus on their core four or five items during that busy time, the company had to perform what Barr described as a “chocolate triage,” but that meant other popular items, such as their toffees, did not get made.
“So a lot of stuff that people love our store for, we have to make sacrifices, and so we end up having stuff that doesn’t get brought out because we’ve run out of time,” he said.
Barr’s had been actively looking for a place to expand for about a year, he said.
“We were just very fortunate to find this place,” he said. “It’s a good, solid building. It needs some work to get it up and going to what we need it for, but it has the bones for what we need.”
While their downtown location will still be used for some of their finer detail work, such as their popular chocolate truffles, the production of the “heavy stuff,” such as their mintie bars, will move to the new factory. They will also have a small store at the new location for those who are unable to find parking downtown.
They are aiming to be open in mid-October.
“My contractor will probably kick me in the shin when he sees me next, but that is really what we’re shooting for, so we can get in here and we can start ramping up for Christmas,” Barr said.
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