It’s a truism he and his wife, Victoria, discovered early on in their efforts to promote their business. As newcomers both to the state of Maine and the business of chocolatiering, Charles and Victoria started out by making a list of all the local retailers that seemed suited to their product line and then visiting them, goods in hand.
“Our success rate on sales calls was very high,” Charles says, and after tasting a few of their creations, I can understand why. During my visit to their kitchen on Main Street in South Portland, I had the good fortune to sample four different items: lemon white chocolate with poppy seeds; chocolate covered cranberries covered in green tea powder; a raspberry cayenne truffle; and salted chocolate — a confection I never would have expected to enjoy, but found absolutely mouth-watering. The flavors in each of the confections were well balanced — the lemon in the white chocolate coming in toward the end with a pleasantly refreshing tang, the cayenne in the raspberry truffle providing a zesty kick without overpowering.
According to Charles, it’s all about choosing the appropriate blend of chocolate to accompany the ingredients in each confection. Robust flavors, like cayenne and raspberry, are paired with heavier, earthier chocolate, while light flavors require milder chocolate blends. “We blend a lot of different types of chocolate to compliment the flavors, so you can taste it going through the stages.”
The Hamiltons pride themselves on their attention to flavor detail, as well as the fact that every item that leaves their kitchen is personally handcrafted by Victoria. At this point in time, they process – to 300 pounds of chocolate per week, depending on the volume of their orders. That’s the equivalent of 4,000 to 8,000 truffles, all of which are carefully prepared by Victoria and packaged by Charles. Needless to say, they have the production side of things down to a science at this point.
“When we did our first big order, back in March of 2007, we were up until midnight every night for five days,” Victoria says. The order consisted of 70 bags of chocolate covered espresso beans and 70 four-piece boxes of truffles to be placed in gift baskets for a corporate client. This year, the Hamiltons filled a similar — though larger — order for the same company, and it took them one half-day.
Of course a year ago, they had just started out and in addition to perfecting their processes and promoting themselves, they were also renting and sharing kitchen space wherever and whenever they could in Portland. Often this meant working late at night and in multiple locations over the course of a month, which, as their orders increased, “became incredibly inconvenient.” Nutmeg Foods has been in its current space for nearly a year now, and having all the right equipment available during the day has been a boon. Eventually, the Hamiltons anticipate having to bring on another baker to help Victoria on the production end and to free up Charles to do some more PR for the business. Right now, with just two people doing all the work, “we don’t have time to get out and sell ourselves,” Charles says.
Still, they seem to be doing pretty well. In Portland alone, their gourmet confections are available in 13 locations, and you can find them in shops from Connecticut — the Nutmeg State from which both of the Hamiltons hale — to Lincolnville, Maine.
But wherever you find Nutmeg Foods’ products, you can be certain that they are fresh. In addition to using as many local ingredients as possible — salt from Maine Sea Salt, Smiling Hill Farm cream, Coffee By Design beans, local honey, Cold River Vodka and products from Stonewall Kitchen, to name a few — Victoria and Charles purchase as much as possible from local vendors, both to support the local economy and cut down on food miles. In addition, they take orders on Monday of each week and deliver the goods by Friday, so nothing sits on the shelves in their kitchen waiting to be sold.
By arranging their production schedule in this way, the Hamiltons are able to free up their weekends, unless, of course, they have a special event that requires extra hours. But in essence, “if no orders come in on Monday, we have a week off,” Charles says, which causes Victoria to chuckle. Then, in unison, they add, “We’re still waiting for that week.”
— Belinda Ray