Craving Sucess: A New Chocolate Company Connects With Customers

Dipping Twinkies, Oreos, pretzels and Chips Ahoy in chocolate has Brittany Starr, 25, and her fledgling company, Crave, dipping toes in the big time.

Brittany Starr of Crave
Photo by Eric Levin.

“I am by no means a chef,” Brittany Starr admits. A few years ago, while completing a bachelor’s degree in business, she considered starting a cupcake company. But after a few experiments, “I realized I’m not a baker.” Yet with two strikes against her, she kept swinging for the fences.

Now, at 25, the River Vale native and her not quite two-year-old company, Crave Chocolate, are connecting solidly with store shoppers, web customers and corporate gift givers. Filling orders for holiday gift baskets—often dozens at a time, she says—from executive assistants, event planners and the like, has kept her running flat out since mid-October.

“For me, it’s a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week thing,” she says, “and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Crave is not about esoteric flavors and exquisite craftsmanship. “I leave that to the French,” she says. Neither is it about exotic chocolates. Crave is about dipping. Into molten dark, milk or white chocolate go Twinkies, Oreos, Rice Krispies, Devil Dogs, Chips Ahoy, pretzels, graham crackers, ginger snaps and other treats, including mini red-velvet cupcakes and macaroons—the only items Crave makes from scratch.
“I take things that are awesome already and make them better by adding chocolate,” Starr says.

Starr and her younger sister, Kaila, 22, grew up in River Vale with their mom, Angela Starr, a businesswoman expert in mobile and other kinds of payment software for retailers. Starr seems to have inherited her mother’s two enthusiasms: business and restaurants. “When we travel,” Starr says, “it’s always around food.” Even so, when Starr went looking for a summer job at 14, she didn’t have food in mind.

“I went door-to-door to every store,” she says. “It was always about making the most of the opportunity.” Any opportunity. As luck would have it, Sugar Flake Bakery in neighboring Westwood offered her a weekend gig. She gladly began reporting for duty at 4:30 am and working until noon, filling cannoli, waiting on customers and taking cake orders. “I get my work ethic from my mom,” she says.

During college, she worked at a local chocolate shop where dipping was done. “I saw it, loved it and started experimenting,” she says. In February 2011, Starr, ready to start her own company, huddled with sister Kaila. On thesaurus.com, Kaila trolled through words related to sweet and treat, eventually seizing on crave.  A computer adept who works for a Bergen County ad and PR agency, Kaila roughed out a simple logo. “Literally in a weekend, we created something that is now Crave Chocolate,” Starr says. “We were in stores a month later.”

First there were hurdles to clear, including incorporation, insurance and professional graphic design leading to a trademark application. “Mom really stepped up to the plate,” Starr says. But most of this all-Starr effort came from the founder herself. Needing to work in a licensed, commercial kitchen, she began calling catering companies. “At least 20 of them said no. Finally, one of them said, ‘Call Giorgio.’”

That was Giorgio Ali, owner of LuSheann Catering, a small storefront operation in River Vale. “He said, ‘No problem. Come over. I’ll give you the keys,’” Starr says. “Every single day he is teaching me things. He is literally the reason I’m in business today.”

In a shoe-leather campaign reminiscent of her teenage job hunt, Starr called on bagel stores and delis around Bergen County. “I gave my spiel, had them taste the chocolates and said, ‘What can we do?’” Seven took Crave chocolates on consignment. By the time cravechocolate.com went live in November 2011, Starr had personally enlisted 40 stores and was phasing out consignment. Corporate gift orders started rolling in as soon as the website launched, she says. “By Christmas it was, you know, a well-oiled machine.”

Modest as they seem, delis and bagel stores in Bergen County and the suburban New York and Connecticut counties where Starr shrewdly placed her attractively packaged goods have a lot of customers who work for companies that send holiday gifts to favored clients and suppliers. A year later, Crave is in nearly 100 retail stores, including one in the Hamptons. Never craven, Crave’s sole owner and (so far) sole full-time employee says she is in talks with a 500-store retail chain. But she won’t be satisfied until Crave launches its own stores. “When I do it,” she says, “I want it to be done right.” Her model of rightness? Apple stores.

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