Describing chocolate making as Igor Van Gerwen’s lifelong passion would not be an overstatement. At the age of 12, the Belgian enrolled in a six-year course for patisserie, sugar work, chocolate- and ice cream-making in his native homeland. One of his teachers, the world-renowned ‘godfather of chocolate’ Roger Geerts, encouraged the young Van Gerwen to specialise in chocolate work. “He thought I had a knack for it,” says Van Gerwen.
After a stint of travelling in his early twenties, Van Gerwen “fell in love with” and settled in Tasmania. He noticed that the vast majority of the quality chocolate being sold was imported from Switzerland and Belgium and realised he could make a fresher product locally.
“It started as a cottage industry, offering fresh product with the quality of Belgian chocolate and the richness of Tasmanian dairy,” Van Gerwen says. “That is still the basis of my business.”
More than 20 years later, Anvers Confectionery specialises in hand-made couverture chocolate, truffles, pralines and fudges made with 64 per cent cacao dark chocolate (the high-street standard contains around 35 per cent), and fine 12 micron particles.
The business centres around the House of Anvers, an attractive 1930s Californian bungalow set in a 1.12 hectare garden in Latrobe, Tasmania. The house incorporates a factory, museum, cafe and shop – all dedicated to the art of chocolate making. It receives over 125,000 visitors a year and provides an environment for people to enjoy and learn about chocolate.
“The Aztecs called chocolate ‘the food of the gods’, they saw it as something really special,” Van Gerwen says passionately. “Now, people eat this cheap sugary confection on the way to work and they call it chocolate.”
Anvers’ products are also sold in department stores, including David Jones and Myer, and airport shops. Despite the fact both David Jones and Myer are reducing their space designated to confectionery – clothes and perfume are apparently more profitable – Anvers is bucking the trend and has increased its shelf space in both. Anvers’ products are also supplied to a number of top restaurants, predominantly in Victoria. Diners at Stefano Di Pieri’s Mildura restaurant Stefano’s and Toby Puttock’s Melbourne eatery Fifteen can enjoy Anver’s luxury confectionery after their meals. Grand Casino is another of Anvers’ big customers.
Enterprise Connect
A couple of years ago, Van Gerwen began working with Enterprise Connect, an Australian Government initiative that supports small businesses, helping them to acquire the knowledge, tools and expertise to improve productivity.
Enterprise Connect business adviser Jack Van Tatenhove carried out the initial assessment of Anvers Confectionery and provided a detailed business-review report, pinpointing its strengths – its brand and market positioning – and its weaknesses. He explained that the company’s margins could be improved by reducing wastage and avoiding double handling, and recommended Van Gerwen applied for Enterprise Connect’s Tailored Advisory Service grant to help implement some of his recommendations.
Anvers used the grant to engage Keystone Industry Solutions to introduce and develop lean manufacturing principles; Business Guidance and Assistance to develop a marketing plan; and Summers and Brown to implement an integrated management system.
Van Gerwyn also completed a company directors’ course – partially funded by Enterprise Connect – at the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He says the course helped him to understand how he could set up a board of directors and increase autonomy within the company so that it can continue to function and grow when he retires.
Streamlining production
Anvers’ products are almost entirely handmade, meaning the production process is unavoidably labour intensive. The factory uses tempering machines to mix and control the temperature of the chocolate, a vibrating table for moulding and a belt for dipping chocolates. Everything else is done by hand.
Van Gerwen explains that the process is more controllable by hand.
“A lot of chocolates are made with injection moulding where the chocolate and filling are made at the same time, but the filling pushes the chocolate to the outside and you always end up with a thick layer of chocolate,” he says. “If you mould by hand you can control thickness and we look for a thickness that is less than a millimetre, so you get a crunch when you bite into the chocolate and then you get the filling.”
While the nature of the business means production will always be incredibly labour intensive, Anvers has been able to streamline the process. The company introduced new systems for measuring, weighing and monitoring the use of different ingredients to reduce wastage.
“If we make a filling of 10kg, we know it should weigh 16kg at the end when we’ve added the chocolate,” Van Gerwen says. ”If we only end up with 13kg, we know 3kg has been wasted but now we can find out where this is happening and if it’s at the piping stage, for example, we can retrain that person or get another person to do that job.”
Anvers has also streamlined its order processing system, making it faster and more cost effective. Before, each order would be produced individually on an ad hoc basis, but the company now combines orders where possible. Paying closer attention to planning, it also works out exactly what needs to be done each day and how long each process should take, so it can ensure it has the right number of staff allocated to each stage and there are no production bottlenecks.
“If someone called up wanting truffles, we’d stop what we were doing and make their truffles immediately,” Van Gerwen says. “Now, when we’re going to make truffles we contact all the chefs that buy them and ask if they’d like to put in an order.
“This has also increased our sales, as it acts as a reminder [for customers].”
To maintain the highest quality, even the packaging is done by hand, acting as a final control check. However, the company has invested in a labelling machine, which has cut down the labelling process from four hours to half an hour.
Increasing autonomy
Van Gerwen emphasises, however, that the business is based on the expertise of its confectioners not complex technology.
“You need two things to do this [make couverture chocolate] – high quality chocolate and the skills to be able to work with it,” says Van Gerwen.
Anvers employs six confectioners at its factory. Each one is trained by Van Gerwen in house and has obtained a minimum of the TAFE certificate III in food processing (confectionery). Anvers also has one trainee confectioner who is two years into her three years of training.
At Enterprise Connect’s suggestion, the factory’s manager Angela Treloggen and its assistant manager Tanya Donnelly, who’ve been with Anvers for 18 and 17 years respectively, are learning more about the management side of the business and studying for the level IIII certificate.
As part of her diploma, Treloggen is learning about lean manufacturing and she and Donnelly visited Melbourne-based manufacturers to see lean manufacturing principles put into practice. Reducing Anvers’ wastage has been its first step toward lean manufacturing but Van Gerwen admits the company still has a long way to go.
As Treloggen and Donnelly take on more of the day-to-day running of the business, Van Gerwen has been freed up to spend more time with customers and develop products to their specific requirements. For example, he created a range of Asian-inspired chocolates for the Port Anvers chocolate cafe, located inside the Harbour City Group souvenir shop in the heart of Chinatown. The range comprises flavours such as green tea with ginger, yuzu caramel, and sticky rice dessert.
“We’re small enough to keep up the artisan skills and create speciality products for chefs, but we’re large enough to be cost effective,” Van Gerwen says.
Growing the business
Moving forward, Van Gerwen is keen to increase distribution. He’s focusing on the local market rather than exports, on the basis that Australian chocolate in Anvers’ market segment is not well perceived abroad.
“When you’re up against companies from Switzerland and Belgium, which have great reputations, you really have to convince customers that your products are as good,” he says. “You’d need several years and a marketing project with a lot of capital to do that.”
In Australia, 95 per cent of the couverture chocolate sold is still imported from Switzerland and Belgium. Van Gerwen says gaining some of that market share would be “as good as exporting”.
He views the food service industry, department and speciality stores as key growth areas and is particularly keen to increase Anvers’ presence in Sydney. The company has previously dealt with Sydney-based distributors that “weren’t a good representation of the company”. Anvers is, once again, looking for a Sydney sales agent, but having been burnt once, Van Gerwen is keen to find the right person.
“We need the right people on the ground,” he says. “Being in Tasmania, it’s hard to build relationships with suppliers. We can’t come over every couple of weeks so we have to rely on other people.”
As a result of Enterprise Connect’s support, the company has managed to increase its output while keeping its staff numbers constant. In the last year, Van Gerwen says, the company has increased sales and volume output by almost 10 per cent. Productivity, he says, is up five per cent, but he believes this figure has the potential to grow to 10 per cent.
Van Gerwen says working with Enterprise Connect has been a positive experience and that he’d encourage other food and drink businesses at the same stage of development to do so.
While his main aim in working with the Victorian business support group was to create a more autonomous business that can continue to operate when he retires, 45-year-old Van Gerwen certainly doesn’t seem ready to give up on his lifelong passion quite yet.
