Filed under Our Shop
Building a chocolate shop: location
We’ve been busy. From a standing start, we’re creating a chocolate shop. In this series of postings, we’re going to try and give you a peek into some of the interesting steps along the way.1
Location, location, location
We’ve tracked through a lot of possible places looking for a good place to set up our shop, and we think we’ve found a winner. Our shopping list for features looks like this:
- 2,000-3,000 feet of space
- A Boulder location with enough street presence and visibility to help generate some local buzz, but not necessarily one that has a lot of retail foot traffic, as we’re going to be primarily a wholesale business
- A space that’s been used as a food manufacturing facility, or can be made into one without too much pain
- Electricity, at least 200 amps, 3-phase for our gear
- Floor drains for clean-up and refrigeration
- A land-lord who will let us build a chocolate factory
- A rental rate that won’t hurt us too much, or at least won’t kill us outright!
The catch has been that there are almost no available food manufacturing spaces in Boulder. We’ve looked at some that would require fumigation and extensive clean-up before use, including a tea manufacturing facility that had chai spices sifting out from behind the baseboards whe you leaned against a wall. Some places didn’t have enough power or didn’t have 3-phase, or wanted to charge us five figures to upgrade the electrical for their entire property. We even considered a spot next to a tatoo parlor and head shop, but the added sales value of catering to Boulderites with the munchies didn’t seem to outweigh the negative cachet we might aquire. After traipsing through more possibilities that I care to remember, and going through two sets of tentative lease negotations, we think we found a spot that’s pretty much perfect for the shop.
5345 Arapahoe Avenue #5, Boulder Colorado
On Arapahoe Avenue in the southeast part of town, we found a small industrial condo we think can be twisted into becoming a chocolate factory. Half the space was an analytical lab with lots of IT infrastructure, and half was used by a printing business. The owner wants to rejoin the two halves and is making the building into condos. It’s close to the bus, has convenient access for people coming into town, and has other up-scale businesses nearby. It also has a reasonable amount of foot traffic for nearby eateries and from the adjacent Ball Aerospace campus. It doesn’t have 3-phase power, but the building does, just 20 feet away. In total, it’s around 2300 square feet, is fairly clean, and best of all, one of our investors is willing to buy it and lease it to us, so we’ll have some leeway to modify the space as we need to.
The disadvantages are that we’ll need to do some demolition, add our floor drains, and probably replace the current overhead garage door with an external roll-up to give us enough space.
Here are some stiched-together panaorama shots of the front and back. (Click the images for a more complete view, as some of the thumbnails are trimmed.)
One more downside: the blue carpet has to go. As does the 12-year-old carpet glue underneath it!
- We’ve been saving up pictures and notes as we go, but we’re just beginning to post these a few weeks away from our start-up date. To make the series more understandable when we look back at it, we’ll be putting dates on the posts based on when we did the work pictured, rather than when we posted them. Hopefully that won’t be too confusing to those of you reading along as these are published! [up]
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