Theo Chocolate - Aaron Lindstrom

Aaron Lindstrom - Interview Transcript

Thinking the other day, I was like, "Oh, at the end of February I was in New York doing different pitches, traveling with chocolate. Now I'm delivering chocolate in my car." I'm doing that, I'm editing videos in my apartment. Our retail staff who was hired to work as retail, work as a tour guide, they're now working, fulfilling a warehouse. Like it's, everyone's doing something completely different. Everyone's adapting. But there's a really great mentality in the company. Lights are still on, still making chocolate, still giving chocolate.

So you can see this is usually our retail store, but since we're closed to the public we've turned it into basically a fulfillment center for our to-go service. So we have two or three of the folks from the retail staff who have just done an amazing job turning this into a pretty well-oiled machine. Where people call, place their orders, they've kind of reconfigured the store so they can fulfill the orders, put them in a little section over in the corner. They have their pick-up section, their delivery section. The delivery section even has, we have different time-slots. There's morning, afternoon, and evening. They have it divided up by time-slots. So, I'm one of the drivers as is our assistant manager Sylvia, so we just come in, see what time slot it is, pick it up! If there's ice cream, add the ice cream. And head out the door. So it's kind of, it looks different, it feels different, but our retail staff has done a phenomenal job of turning this into basically an entirely new business.

When you look at different ways that we can help give back there's the Theo-To-Go, but also working with as many local charities and organizations as possible. Which we've always worked with in the past, but now it's what more can we do. So donating chocolate, obviously, it's one of the best ways we can help give back is just free chocolate. So we're looking at different food shelters like Ballard Food Bank, we've been working through Food Lifeline with them. In the past we've had special chocolate boxes made and now just wherever they say they could use some extra attention. UW Medicine, we donated a pallet of chocolate. Which, if you don't know a pallet, it's just a massive, like more chocolate than you could possibly think of. Just a massive pallet of chocolate. FareStart, Mary's Place... Also we're partnering with Molly Moon's to give ice cream for our delivery service, but they also have their Anna Banana Milk Fund. Order your chocolate and then also donate $10 to their milk fund. So just small ways we can help. Whether it's chocolate, just promoting another person's charity, whatever we can do to help.

Just the fact that we can stay open, the fact that we can continue to make chocolate, we're not having to put a hold on production, which then would mean putting a hold on ordering beans, we're still able to make chocolate. We're still able to support Theo employees and support farmers. And the fact that people are still able to buy our chocolate is helping support farmers. While we've had to change how we run our business, we haven't had to close business. So we're still supporting locals and we're still supporting farmers in the Congo.