Nestled in the heart of Eva Street (Wellington’s most sought after foodie laneway) Wellington Chocolate Factory has been lovingly handcrafting New Zealand’s finest small-batch chocolate since 2013.
It’s common knowledge in the Capital that New Zealand’s original, organic, bean-to-bar chocolate producer offers true to the bean flavours. Nothing is added except what matters - allowing the taste and real character of its beans to shine. Organic, sustainable, and contributing to a better world, Wellington Chocolate Factory sources only the highest quality beans from ethical suppliers. They are supporting local farmers, ensuring fair trade and creating a better world, one bean at a time. Safe to say, it’s a firm local favourite.
However, for owner Gabe Davidson the road of running a business hasn’t always been as silky smooth as his bars. Behind the chocolate wrapper, there have been ups and downs, and a great deal of graft involved with building and scaling his business. Although no stranger to start-ups, Gabe has found Wellington Chocolate Factory fascinating, rewarding and challenging. He is honest about how it has helped him become a better entrepreneur by learning from the business. Right now, he has stepped back from management and is focusing on flavours and being the spokesperson for the brand (he has also started doing a little driving for Kaibosh)."
"I was born in Kenepuru Hospital in Porirua. I grew up in a little bay called Brendan Beach, at Pukerua Bay. I loved it there” says Gabe. “I had a very social childhood with lots of people popping in, and cousins close by, visiting for dinner. Sometimes, during the springtide, we’d have to make a run for it over the rocks to get home. We lived in a simple bach with a front yard that smelt like seaweed, brine and wet Border Collie. One day it would be pristine and still like a millpond and the next day it would be completely wild.”
Gabe attended Pukerua Bay school (“I’d like my kids to go there”). His early career choice was local magician, and he would put on shows for random sunbathers on the beach. However, music soon overtook magic as a passion. Gabe left school early so that he could attend the Wellington music conservatory where he received a diploma. “There were a lot of great musicians who went through at the time,” he remembers. Gabe then played music professionally (and still does play). However, he admits that it’s hard to make a living as a professional musician, especially in Wellington.
Hospitality provided the perfect solution to make ends meet. Gabe began working at Krazy Lounge and then Fuel Espresso in the early 2000s. Fuel were pioneers in Wellington in the science of coffee and Gabe quickly learned the ropes. “Fuel were full-on quality nerds and through them, I became very interested in making coffee. I worked there for a couple of years. In Melbourne on tour with ‘The Offbeats’ I noticed that there was a gap in the market for good takeaway espresso. My girlfriend at the time and I decided to pack up and moved across the ditch. We opened a takeaway coffee window in a discount hosiery store - an odd mix. The owner ended up leaving and we took over the whole shop” Gabe remembers. “We got lucky and had good rent. It was the start of opening multiple coffee shops, and bringing Wellington’s coffee culture to Melbourne”
After 13 years, Gabe decided to come back to home. “I felt like I had done everything I could with coffee, and there was another wave of coffee culture coming through. My twenty-year career was ending in that space. Fortunately, my drinking chocolate company was doing quite well so I was able to sell up the last of my shops and go traveling. That’s when I found that there were small chocolate factories popping up around the world. Until then, I’d only known about big chocolate companies who bought all their chocolate in West Africa. I found the idea of making chocolate on a small scale fascinating. I visited New York to visit some bean-to-bar places, then Peru to visit some farms. No one had done a craft bean-to-bar chocolate factory here in New Zealand yet, and I was ready to move back. I got super excited about swapping from the coffee bean to the cocoa bean.”
For Gabe, being tucked away in a commercial kitchen making chocolate was never an option. He wanted an open-plan, transparent factory, similar to ones he’d seen overseas. “Having an open-plan factory lets us show how the process works from start to finish. If we make good quality, there should be no secrecy. The industry is changing and people are now favouring being more open and transparent” Gabe says.
However, there was a surprise in store: Gabe went to Commonsense Organics one day and saw a 50g Dominican Republic bar which was handmade in New Zealand. “I thought ‘Oh no! Someone else is already doing it’” he says.
Gabe got in touch with chocolate-guru Rochelle Harrison, his co-founder. She was already making single-origin chocolate and had got into some great key stores around Wellington but was keen to work with Gabe to build something bigger. “‘I have a plan to open a chocolate factory’ I told her,” says Gabe. “Together, we combined our skills and capital and started up the Wellington Chocolate Factory.”
There have been plenty of delicious highlights in the journey so far (including when the factory collaborated with Allbirds). Gabe and Rochelle also sailed a cargo of cocoa beans 4,329 kilometers in a traditional waka, along with the Fijian crew. They undertook the odyssey out of the belief chocolate can be "a force for good". “It was exciting but it was also challenging; it was meant to take 6 weeks but it took 3 months to get a one-tonne shipment of cocoa beans from Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea, to Wellington in 29 days without using fuel or engines.”
Another highlight was winning the International Chocolate Awards, who named the factory’s Peru single-origin chocolate bar the best in the world. “I was so proud of our passionate chocolate makers when we won,” Gabe says. “We always work hard to make the beans into the best chocolate we can. Whether it’s buying the beans at a fair price and growing the industry in the Pacific, we feel we can make a difference. Our goal is to help small farmers in Melanesia and in the Pacific, giving them feedback and helping grow a partnership for the future.”
Gabe particularly loved day to day work in the factory in the early days, especially building a team of people that really believed in the excitement and mission of what Wellington Chocolate Factory set out to do.
However, not everything has been easy, especially when he needed to step into the role of general manager. “I think I’m better at the beginning, and I’m not so good at general management. I’m a creative person, not an organisation person” he says honestly. “After our general manager left a few years ago I was starting to worry I was getting burnt out. It was a challenging time because we’d dropped our margins at the time by 30% to make our bars more accessible which meant we needed to make our processes more efficient. Moving from small niche stores into big supermarkets was a bit like walking through the valley of death, and you don’t know when the light at the end of the tunnel is coming. Eventually, the staff and board of directors rallied together and everyone told me to stop pushing so hard and have a rest. It was so kind. I was trying to be someone I wasn’t, and that’s really tough” says Gabe.
Overall, Gabe is philosophical about the experience. “Lots of business people beat themselves up for the things they’re not good at. But now we have someone much better, who is complementary. They love what they do. Whereas, in the end, I couldn’t stand it” he chuckles. “We have it more together in the business than we ever have.” Now, the factory, and its team is better than ever and its founders are able to focus on new, exciting projects which light their fire.
Despite the challenges of having to grow with Wellington Chocolate Factory, Gabe is personally proud that it is still around after seven years, and it’s as good - if not better - than what his original vision was for the business. “In the day to day you forget that it is better than what I dreamed of. We need to remember to look back and go ‘Oh, shit. That was a seemingly unattainable thing I did. What other unattainable things can I do?’” he says.