Chocolate starts with the beans. At any one time the Haigh’s storage warehouse might hold 250 tonnes of cocoa beans from plantations in equatorial countries including Ghana, Venezuela, Ecuador and Grenada. These are roasted, ground and blended in the Haigh’s factory according to family recipes, which have been in development since the company started in Adelaide in 1915. Today, Haigh’s produce eight different chocolate blends, each with their own flavour profile, as well as single-origin varieties; in total Haigh’s roasts almost 10,000 kilograms of beans every week.
The process is a long one. First, the cocoa beans are roasted to a specific profile then broken so that the cocoa nibs are separated from the husks. The nibs are ground into a thick paste, called cocoa mass, and mixed with cocoa butter, vanilla and icing sugar, with milk powder also added for milk chocolate. The resulting slurry is rolled to ensure smoothness, and then mixed and aerated in a heated conch machine during a 10-hour process to remove excess moisture, develop flavour and caramelise the milk powder. More cocoa butter is added and the chocolate is then pumped into holding tanks. 20 tonnes of chocolate a week are shipped to the Haigh’s finishing factory at Parkside.
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Many of Haigh’s 250 varieties of chocolate have gone through a rigorous testing process. Off the factory floor, a tasting panel meets fortnightly to consider prototypes of new flavours. Sugared almonds recently got the nod, as did a mango and chilli-filled chocolate. The salted caramel recipe took three years of tweaking before it went into production.
Many of the chocolates are hand-finished and hand-packed, including the chocolate speckles.
The speckles, 14 million of which are produced a year, are made with a machine that drops large dollops of melted chocolate onto trays of hundreds and thousands, which are then left to set before they’re bagged ready for sale.
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Easter eggs are made by pouring molten chocolate – a thinner blend made with extra cocoa butter – into moulds attached to a spinning machine. They’re then cooled to set the shape.
Each egg is wrapped individually by hand in ribbed foil, and a unique suite of foil colours is used for Haigh’s eggs each year.
Easter is the busiest time of year for Haigh’s, with production ramping up from January, and the season’s final eggs being wrapped as late as the day before Good Friday.
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