While some people spend their 20s trying to figure out what they want to do, Steffi Smith was busy building a chocolate empire. At just 34-years-old, Steffi has been running The Chocolate Smiths for over 12 years, and it’s been a rollercoaster. From making 20 bars at a time in her microwave at home, to shipping over 200,000 bars per year, Steffi talks us through her journey as a businesswoman, and how she’s realised that nurturing her team is the most important part of the recipe.
Having always known she wanted a creative career, Steffi began studying music and game design at Teesside University but after a year found she wasn’t enjoying the course at all. At the time, her mum owned a small chocolate shop in Morpeth’s Sanderson Arcade, so Steffi went to work there, learning how to temper small batches of chocolate and experiment with ingredients. Steffi was put in charge of the truffle cabinet because she loved dreaming up different flavour combinations. Long term, her mum’s business didn’t work out, but the passion for chocolate had already been ignited within Steffi.
In the breakroom of The Chocolate Smiths’ colourful chocolate factory in North Shields, there is an excitable buzz surrounding their new Halloween packaging, which has just arrived. Steffi says: “I’m very lucky because both my parents are quite entrepreneurial. While I was working with my mum I’d told her I had this idea to make ‘bizarre’ chocolate, a bit like Willy Wonka,” she laughs. In 2014, her dad lent her the initial £2,000 she had budgeted to start The Chocolate Smiths and bought chocolate moulds, ingredients and equipment to set up a stall at Tynemouth Market. Her business partner at the time, Amy, designed all the packaging for their ‘Bizarre Bars’, with flavours like maple bacon, cheese and crackers and bubble gum sundae. When Fenwick in Newcastle asked to stock their chocolate, they expanded production into a small industrial unit.
Three years into running the business, Steffi became a mum to her eldest daughter, Faith. Returning from maternity leave, she and Amy realised that although they were making and selling a lot of chocolate, the numbers simply weren’t adding up and the overdraft was growing. Amy decided running the business just wasn’t for her, but they remained good friends, and Steffi’s belief in The Chocolate Smiths was still strong. “When a business isn’t working, I like to think of it as like an equation – you just haven’t got the right numbers in the right place.”
With a naturally outgoing personality, Steffi decided to try a more direct approach to chocolate sales – being in front of the camera. She explains: “I started posting little videos on Instagram saying ‘Hi, how’s your day? Let me show you what I’m making!’ When I did, there was a little flurry of orders on the website.” These updates became a daily occurrence, involving her growing number of followers in decisions about new chocolate flavours and even chatting about what she was going to cook for dinner. She’s talked openly about being diagnosed with ADHD at 31, and juggling motherhood with running a growing business – an honesty that both her followers and team clearly value.
Around 2019 she hit upon the idea of the ‘collaboration bar’. Speaking to other small business owners, they all agreed how hard it was to make customers understand why handmade products cost more. She says: “I messaged Rich, the owner of The Cookie Mill who make deep dish cookies, as I had this idea to make a chocolate bar using his cookies as the filling. We’d promote it together and tell everyone about his business inside the wrapper.” They made 100 bars initially and sent samples out to food bloggers to build up the hype. Released in January, usually a quiet time for chocolate sales, Steffi and Rich were astounded when all the collaboration bars sold out in 20 minutes. She laughs: “My phone was pinging with all these orders, I’d never known anything like it. I said to Rich ‘that’s 100 people that are going to read about your business!”
By the time the pandemic hit in 2020, The Chocolate Smiths was well established as an online brand. Steffi had her second daughter Charlotte that year, leaving her busier than ever, but with the lockdowns came more online orders, leading them to take on a bigger production unit and more staff that December. She remembers: “The new unit was self-funded, I was so proud we were able to do it, I had no idea that within a few weeks the demand would skyrocket again.”
Just days after the move, The Chocolate Smiths received a ‘shoutout’ on Instagram from the popular fitness trainer Joe Wicks, who had ordered their chocolate online. With over 1 million followers, Joe finished his videos saying everyone should follow along and buy the chocolate because they were such a passionate small business. “Our Instagram following went from 50,000 to 136,000 overnight. There were 14,000 people on the website at one point.”
Steffi says she will always be grateful to Joe because he gave the business such a huge boost, but the three years following were some of the hardest she’s dealt with. “It all grew so quickly, we took on more debt, and I ended up not having a clue what direction we were going in. I was crying in my car before going into work in the morning because it had all changed so fast.” By April 2024 she was due to give birth to twins Rosie and Lily and was again faced with the decision whether to close it all down. Her partner Alex, who she says has been incredibly supportive through the ups and downs, encouraged her to stay with it.
“Sometimes you need to get to that point where you’ve got nothing left to lose in order to realise what you want,” Steffi reflects. She went with her instinct to change their chocolate bars to a new, distinctively shaped mould. Their graphic designer leaned heavily into an olde-worlde Victorian chocolate factory theme, weaving intriguing back-stories and interactive elements into the product packaging. She also decided they would start making all their fillings from scratch. Elements like salted caramel that had previously been bought in, were made in-house after lots of recipe trials and taste testing. Taking back control over the creative process, Steffi says she finally felt the spark reignite for what she was doing. “At first I was scared to get excited, but a few months in I found myself really thinking about the future of the business and I knew that was a good sign.”
They now get through a whopping 30–40 tonnes of chocolate per year, with 24 staff currently working in the business. In a ‘full circle’ moment, Steffi’s mum now works at The Chocolate Smiths too, which they both love. Business growth is steady, something she says is closely tied in with being a mum of four and trying to find that ever-elusive work/life balance. She gets frustrated that she can’t commit as much time to the business as she would like to but has come to realise that everything can wait. “There are all these things we’ve got lined up, but I’ll never get my time back with the girls. I think it’s important to stand by that and recognise that I do have a choice what I do with this business. I like when we grow at our own pace and I need to make sure the people around me are happy, that’s my main priority.”
Collaboration bars are still going strong, the latest being ‘The Bakineer’: a 390g beast of a bar, and Steffi’s current favourite, it’s filled with roasted pecan gianduja, maple caramel, salted caramel sauce and white chocolate and pecan blondie.
Despite a huge increase in global cocoa prices, two years ago she decided to make the switch to ethical brand Luker Chocolate as their main supplier. She has visited the Luker training facility in Colombia three times, on the last trip taking five team members with her. She explains: “The thing I love about Luker is that they treat you like family and there’s no question left unanswered. You meet the cocoa farmers, they’re transparent with everything. For the team to see where the product originates from gives us all so much respect for how much hard work goes into it.”
Using their bespoke chocolate blends from Luker, the team back in North Shields are constantly devising new recipes and flavours, many inspired by favourite desserts. Current delights on The Chocolate Smiths’ online shop include The Pistachio Cannoli Inspired Bizarre Bar and the Cream Tea Bizarre Bar – incorporating a clotted cream and Earl Grey white chocolate ganache, a strawberry gel and an almond and scone praline, made with locally baked scones from Tynemouth Coffee Bakery.
Steffi’s adopted a motto that she heard on her visit to Luker Chocolate in Colombia: “Nurture your team and a great product will follow.” After 12 years, it’s clear that the secret recipe at The Chocolate Smiths has always been the people, but we can’t wait to see what the next Bizarre Bar will be.
The Chocolate Smiths’ bars are available from their website www.thechocolatesmiths.com
