Customer Feature: Centre & Main Chocolate

ShipTime Customer Feature

Presenting Centre & Main Chocolate!

Owned and run by award winning chocolatier, Angela Roest, Centre and Main offers a fresh and unique approach to artisan chocolate.

Angela’s chocolate creations are a celebration of local food.

Her unique talent for finding perfectly balanced local flavours is guided by the local growing season and what is currently available at its peak of freshness.

This approach has inspired some incredibly diverse chocolate creations that have won both Canadian and International awards.

With elegance and skill, Angela combines unique local ingredients with the finest ethically-sourced chocolate from across the globe.

It all started with locally-produced saffron and chocolate.

This was the ‘trigger’ for Angela that helped her envision the diverse flavours possible from her local area.

About Centre and Main Chocolate & ShipTime

Tell us about Centre & Main Chocolate.

I’m Angela Roest, the owner and chocolatier at Centre & Main Chocolate, a multiple award-winning chocolate studio in the heart of Warkworth, Ontario.

All chocolate is made in small batches and our bars are a celebration of local food.

I collaborate with local farmers, foragers and food producers to create a range of flavours that reflects a ‘taste of place’.

This approach sets my creations apart and has earned international recognition for excellence and innovation.

How does Centre & Main Chocolate help your customers?

Chocolate is a comfort food. People naturally gravitate to chocolate to celebrate as well as soothe. And, because our chocolate is as beautiful as it is delicious, it makes gifting easy (and it’s fun to choose the flavours).

I’ve also found that people are increasingly looking for high quality gifts (for themselves or for others) that lead to memorable experiences, and chocolate is an indulgence you can count on.

When did you start using ShipTime?

For years, I’d been shipping all of my wholesale chocolate orders with a courier service, but it had become very expensive.

I looked into a few different options and found ShipTime. I thought that there might be a steep learning curve but not at all, it’s a very user-friendly platform.

With very little effort, the process was made both easier and less expensive, especially for members of CFIB.

And it has made shipping so much more efficient – I absolutely love having a “Box Library”!

Has ShipTime ever helped you when you were in a crunch or is there one? If So, please elaborate.

Shipping chocolate during the summer is very risky.

My chocolate doesn’t contain any waxes or stabilizers that help it to resist melting during hot weather (they taste awful!) and so, my chocolate is extremely vulnerable to heat..

This summer, I noticed that one of my shipments had not arrived on time, that it was a day late. I called ShipTime to check out what was happening and they were immediately on it.

As they followed the package, it was delivered. They then contacted the stockist (Barchef, which they knew because they are another ShipTime client) to make sure everything was intact and still solid (it was!).

What does having a Heroic Support Team available from ShipTime mean to your business?

Heroic Support is like a safety net.

If something isn’t quite right, you can talk to a person, not an answering service, who will quickly figure things out and move things along.

And speed is everything when shipping chocolate in the summer.

What are your future goals for your business?

Contrary to most businesses, I don’t want to grow much larger.

Being small allows me to make chocolate everyday and create new recipes instead of doing paperwork or administrative work that can easily take over in larger operations.

So, in the future, I want to continue to explore local flavours and create luscious ways to blend them into chocolate.