CHICAGO — Next time you wander through the specialty food aisle in Whole Foods, you may want to look for the Colts name for a product with local ties.
And no, it has nothing to do with the Indianapolis football team.
This Colts has everything to do with chocolate and the myriad ways one can enrobe chocolate around things such as almonds, salted caramel, peanut butter and graham crackers. This is, after all, Colts Chocolate Co., handcrafted in Tennessee, owned by former Chicagoland area family members Dirk Peterson, Michael Doherty and Chris Smith, and Ashley Quinn (a friend of Peterson’s and St. Louis native).
Their signature products range from Colts Bolts, a puck-sized peanut butter cup with all-natural peanut butter topped with almonds and sandwiched between layers of chocolate; Bolt’s Bites, golf ball-sized versions of the Bolt; and Marie McGhee’s Bumble Bees, the Colts take on a turtle.
“We bill our products as a modern twist on classic chocolates,” said Peterson, a civil engineer by trade, now partner in Colts Chocolate.
Think, for example, fudge brownies, but layered with whiskey-infused caramel and ganache.
“It’s something like you never tasted before,” he said. “Super rich.”
The Bumble Bees are studded with roasted pecans and salted caramel; graham cracker crumbs are baked in butter and blanketed with chocolate for their Broadway Grahams.
“It gives it a really soft texture and a really soft bite, like the crust of a cheesecake,” Peterson said. “It is something you’ve never tasted. You just change a little bit of the ingredient to make it just that much better, and people love it.”
The chocolate itself is sourced from the Barry Callebaut facility in the Southwest Side neighborhood of Archer Heights, part of a Switzerland-based chocolate company with its U.S. headquarters in Chicago — a change in production brought on by the new owners.
Peterson, a former Barrington, Illinois, resident and LaPorte, Indiana, native, bought the Nashville-based Colts in September 2018 with his cousin, Doherty (an Elmhurst native) and Smith (his wife’s uncle from the McHenry area). The family members saw Colts Chocolate, founded in 1984 by Mackenzie Colt, a cast member of the former TV series “Hee Haw,” as an investment idea.
While small, Colts was doing sales within the high six figures with its award-winning recipes, he said. After a rebrand and a move to a new factory, Colts products moved from four Whole Foods stores in Tennessee to hundreds of stores around the nation, and soon The Fresh Market locations.
Doherty, a River North resident and Fenwick High School alumnus, said it all started with the Elmhurst Whole Foods.
“I was thinking if we can get into at least the Midwest region of Whole Foods, I’ve got a pretty good foothold as far as family, friends, and school connections where if we get the word out, people will be able to recognize the Colts brand,” said Doherty, a former BMO Harris employee. “I think we got added in June to all the stores in the Midwest. It’s been really cool to see a chocolate brand from Nashville get welcomed in the Chicago area. All of our family and friends have been really excited to see the brand come into stores.”
Taking the brand to the next level hasn’t been easy. Growing the brand during the COVID-19 pandemic has had its challenges. Case in point: Supply chain constraints. Chocolate shortages, and then a trucking shortage became a hurdle in getting product anywhere last December, Doherty said. So he flew from Chicago to Philadelphia, picked up a 20-foot U-Haul truck and drove it to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to the Colts Chocolate supplier’s warehouse, picked up about 10,000 pounds of chocolate and drove it 15 hours through the Appalachian Mountains into Nashville.
“And that was to make Christmas happen, otherwise we never would have fulfilled corporate orders in the December push that we had — our biggest time of year,” Peterson said. “For us, it was a life-or-death situation.”
But the Colts team is bent on thriving, not just surviving. Already in more than half of all Whole Foods stores, Peterson said he hopes that will jump to 100% by the first quarter of 2023, to become a permanent part of their specialty section plans. Doherty and Peterson said they constantly get pictures and texts from friends and family about finding Colts products while visiting small retailers and boutique shops in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
And while the mainstays keep customers returning, Doherty said Colts Chocolate encourages its social media followers to suggest new chocolate products for the company to try on a monthly basis. The Colts team is looking to move forward with the Jolt, a coffee-infused Bolt-esque product where coffee beans are in the chocolate.
Fans whose ideas become a product of the month receive a $100 gift card. Recent picks include a chocolate-covered cookie dough bite, and a s’mores version with a marshmallow center.
“There’s a million different chocolate bar brands out there ... and your head just goes in circles trying to figure out what bar is better,” Peterson said. “We found a niche in the specialty food section by the cheeses and wines. Our Bella Bark and our Bolts, you cut them up, and place them next to the meats and cheeses on a charcuterie board, they pair very well with wine.”
As talk of expansion in the next five years centers around high-end gourmet grocery stores., Doherty and Peterson said they’ve discussed opening a Chicago-based retail location — a possible chocolate cafe in the vein of the Starbucks Roastery, with rare and exclusive options on display.
“We were very close a year and a half ago, right when COVID hit, to setting up a kiosk or a cart in Water Tower Place. And then it did not come together,” Peterson said. “Chicago would be the next market because of our connections — we know the market, we feel comfortable there. That would be after we maybe set up one more shop in Nashville. But that’s probably maybe a year or two down the line when we can think about the retail side of things after we get our feet on the ground with the wholesale.”
