Port headquarters a sign of Hollander’s success

For the past two years, Hollander Chocolate Co. has been busy converting the former auto dealership on Port Washington’s south side into a state-of-the-art headquarters complete with an innovation lab and cafe that will be open to the public.

Although the company has been working out of the building on South Spring Street for some time now, President and founder Doug Podzilni said Friday that the renovations are wrapping up and he hopes the building will be fully open in the next 60 days.

“We’re on the one-yard line,” Podzilni said. “It’s getting real. It’s getting exciting.”

The Port building was never envisioned as a production facility, he noted, but instead will serve as the company’s world headquarters with offices, a distribution center housing raw materials and finished goods, an innovation lab and public spaces  that include a chocolate museum and coffee shop.

The cafe won’t just feature Hollander’s chocolate products but will have a full menu for breakfast and lunch.

Once a week, Hollander hopes to open it’s innovation lab and offer samples of items its testing for the public to try so the company can get their feedback.

“The idea is once a week, whatever we’re working on that day we want the public to try,” Podzilni said, noting many of the things they try never “see the light of day.”

There’s also a kitchen ideal for corporate meetings, school groups and others that Hollander also plans to use for podcasts and social media videos.

It recently hosted its first outside group in the space, the Wisconsin Humane Society, which needed a place for a retreat.

And, Podzilni noted, the site has plenty of room for expansion — good for a company that’s growing by leaps and bounds.

“As soon as we add an office, we’re filling it,” he said. “Chocolate for coffee shops is a super massive market, and we’re the leading chocolate-in-coffee company.”

Hollander exports to 12 countries, and it recently hired a country manager to handle operations in South Korea and Asia, with Podzilni explaining that in Seoul and Pusan, South Korea, there are about 40,000 specialty coffee shops. 

“You literally can’t throw a rock without hitting a coffee shop,” he said.

In the United States, there are about 25,000 specialty coffee shops, not including Starbucks. 

Sales of Hollander products are up more than 50% from last year, Podzilni said, and last year they were up 50% from the previous year.

“We’ve surpassed what we thought we could achieve when we started,” he said. “We’re reassessing what the possibilities are.”

Podzilni credited much of the company’s success to Alden Kelley, the company’s vice  president of marketing, and Kurt Blum, vice president of sales.

“They’ve made us into the driving force in the chocolate-in-coffee industry,” he said. Hollander Chocolate makes high-quality chocolate syrups and powders, primarily for the coffeehouse and restaurant industry, but is branching out into other areas, such as a recently introduced line of hot fudge perfect for ice cream treats and hot cocoa.

The hot cocoa, which has 2-1/2 times the cacao as the popular Swiss Miss brand, meets the company’s aim of creating an experience of “elevated nostalgia,” Kelley said.

“It’s a premium product that brings you back to being a kid,” he said.

But coffee drinks remain the company’s mainstay.

“Hundreds of thousands of drinks are made every day with Hollander Chocolate,” Podzilni said.

Despite that, the public doesn’t necessarily know the Hollander Chocolate name, and that’s by design.

“All that matters is that the customer comes back to the coffee shop to get another mocha,” Kelley said. “We give our customers the building blocks to make a phenomenal product.”

Hollander, he noted, has grown primarily through word of mouth and by people sampling its products.

“What’s important to us is getting people to try our products,” he said. 

The company has grown so much that two years ago Podzilni started looking for a place to consolidate many of its operations. 

Among the most important factors, Kelley said, was finding a community that would embrace Hollander and where a community of talented people was located that the company could hire.

Port was that place, and Hollander has invested significantly to make itself part of the community.

Its renovations of the former auto dealership have been significant. It had to remove remnants of the dealership and bring the building up to food-grade standards so it could receive needed state and federal certifications.

“Every wall, every floor, every ceiling has been changed,” Podzilni said. “We spent more money remodeling this building than we spent buying it.”

Kelley added, “It may look from the outside like ‘What’s happening there?’ Everything’s been happening.”

In addition to the building conversion, Hollander is also creating a mobile coffee shop from an old Volkswagen microbus purchased in Brazil that will be used to bring Hollander products to festivals and fairs.

“It’s our Oscar Mayer Weinermobile,” Kelley said.

Hollander has made it a point to introduce itself to businesses in Port, looking for ways to use its products in their goods.

“It’s our mission to introduce ourself to every business in downtown to see how we can collaborate with them and make it a win-win situation,” Podzilni said.