Harison Chocolates celebrates tenth anniversary and new collection with Moodie Davitt home page makeover

Prologue: Dubai-based Harison Chocolates has stepped up the preparations for its tenth anniversary celebrations this year with a striking makeover of The Moodie Davitt Report desktop homepage and an elegantly curated treatment of our mobile website.

The travel retail-exclusive brand (other than in the USA, where it is available in Walmart), owned by Aal Mir Group-controlled Sweetgarden Travel & Retail, has also unveiled a new-look 2024 collection, including a first French chocolate assortment to honour the landmark anniversary.

The range was previewed in early June during a three-day event in Dubai attended by some 60 travel retail partners from around the globe.

In an exclusive interview, Harison Chocolates CEO & Chief Brand Architect and Sweetgarden Travel & Retail Managing Director (and minority shareholder) Shibu Thomas talks to The Moodie Davitt Report Founder & Chairman Martin Moodie about the company’s journey to date and the keys to what has been an extraordinary success story.

Congratulations Shibu on reaching the grand age of ten with Harison Chocolates. I know from running my own business and speaking to many entrepreneurs how difficult it is to start a brand and ensure it not only survives but flourishes. You’ve done precisely that in a highly competitive sector surrounded by multi-nationals. Sum up that achievement for us.

As you know, we launched this brand very modestly in September 2014 with just six SKUs from Italy and Belgium, three from each country.

At the time, we [Aal Mir Group] had almost 35 years’ experience as a confectionary distributor, dealing with more than 100 brands across the world, delivering to 5,000 stores within the UAE and Oman.

So we had great experience understanding of confectionery and chocolates. Where the best chocolates were coming from; who the big players were; what pricing was best suitable for a particular market; different segments of the market and so on.

We were selling many other brands into duty free, where there is usually a price comparison with the domestic market. There was always a problem with duty-free retailers saying your products are available at the local market for a certain price. And they would say they could not sell at that price, as their margin expectations were higher because of very high operational costs.

So we identified a gap in the market. That’s why we launched Harison as a brand exclusive to the duty-free stores.

Through hard work and because we had a lot of knowledge about the market, the brand really succeeded right from the beginning.

We asked, what price, what product and what value for money proposition were people looking for. So we provided the best in terms of what the market was seeking. That’s the success we are enjoying now.

So with your focus right from the get-go to be travel retail-exclusive, you avoided invidious price comparisons with local markets and were able instead to give wholehearted support and commitment to the channel.

Exactly. That is what we aimed to do and we still continue to do so. And that’s the reason we have become a leader in the market. Wherever we are, we always rank in the top ten brands. In one of our locations we are number one and in others we are number three, four or five.

As Sweetgarden, we also deliver a few other brands as a distributor and have become number three confectionery supplier in the GCC market and India region. As a supplier, we have a huge command within the segment.

Many multinational, 100-year-old brands are behind Harison… we have become a leader now in the confectionery market rather than a trailing brand.

That is one heck of an achievement by an independent brand in a key category against some heavyweight competition. 

Thank you very much for the kind words. As I said, our success is that we kept the brand exclusive to duty free. Even today, 30-35% of our business is from people who come into the duty-free store specifically to buy Harison.

We are driving people into the duty-free stores, because people cannot buy this product outside. So if I am travelling, say, from Dubai to India, I may have demands from my family or friends back in India to please bring this chocolate because they cannot buy it in India.

Many of my customers who previously didn’t know the brand come into the duty-free stores with a picture of it or a wrapper which they were given as a reminder to buy Harison as a gift.

We are very happy to see that. That exclusivity, which drives people into the duty-free stores, is key to the success of the brand because with others their products are available in all the supermarkets, mini-markets, everywhere. Often people buy those products in duty free as an impulse simply because they are in the store. But for Harison, volume is driven by demand – real demand created by the brand.

That’s interesting, Shibu, because there’s an old adage that says you cannot build a brand in duty free – that you need a domestic market foundation before you can succeed in the channel. And yet you’ve proven with everything you’ve done over the past ten years that you can indeed build a brand in duty free.

So I want to push you a bit more on that. There’s got to be more to it than simply the fact Harison is unavailable anywhere else. And, of course, it starts with the product itself, right? You have also placed a big and purist focus on the quality of the chocolate.

That is exactly what we intended to do right from the beginning. Our tagline in those days was ‘Premium chocolate at an affordable price’.

So we created a premium chocolate using the best recipes from the best chocolate-producing countries, and we put it in value packaging. That way we gave maximum value to the consumer rather than using expensive packaging where the value is more than the product itself. And when you deliver a real value product to the consumer, they really appreciate it and become a loyal customer of your brand.

While we try to minimise the cost of packaging, we do it nowadays in a sustainable way. So we don’t want to go into plastic or metal… we go into sustainable paper packaging.

In marketing, we talk about the ‘four Ps’ – the product, the price, the place and the promotion. So we target all four. Many companies are purely profit driven. We are not. We are a brand-building house. We are more socialist in our approach – we want to share the benefits with the consumer rather than taking all the profit and keeping it in our pocket.

It’s a great mantra and possibly a unique one in our industry. Tell us about your recent tenth anniversary celebrations in Dubai.

It was a big occasion with around 65 people over a three-day event. Because we are based here and our guests came from many different places, we wanted to give them a good treat in Dubai.

So over three days we had a cruise party and another at Sofitel The Palm Dubai. We also took them for an evening desert drive and on another day invited them to our warehouse facility.

People were so happy to visit and people from the travel retail side of our business – which is only 5% of our group turnover – never expected to see the size of operation we have. That helped their understanding about our whole company in terms of size and volume.

You are marking the tenth anniversary in style with the event, a spectacular makeover of our website and your new product range. What can you tell us about the latest collection?  

So we are launching a new line of French Truffles. Previously, as I mentioned, we had three countries of origin: Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. Now we are adding a fourth and we have one more in the pipeline – sugar-free chocolates, vegan chocolate and protein bars coming from Germany, our fifth country of origin.

So by the end of September, we will have five origins within the brand. We work with different factories within those countries. We give them our recipe and they produce according to the recipe and the standards and quality that we mandate on each product.

We have launched two flavours of French Truffles, cocoa and hazelnut, and two varieties of premium Belgian chocolate-coated Chocodates, dark and milk, manufactured in the UAE. Additionally, for our top-selling Italian Premium Truffles and Pralines, we have introduced new 300g and 100g sustainable  gift boxes – 3 ×300g and 3 x 100g.

What inspired the new 2024 collection?

There has been a lot of demand from consumers who say they want differentiation in packaging for gifting.

We noticed that demand because we interact with our consumers every day. We have around 42 Brand Ambassadors stationed in different countries and every day these 42 people talk to different customers and listen to their comments about the brand.

We discovered they were asking for different packaging. So we decided to introduce better, beautiful and stylish packaging to the market. That is the reason we designed and created new packaging with the existing product line.

The French truffle is a classic product. The truffle with the cocoa powder coating gives a unique taste. It is very much in demand but is not there in the duty-free stores.

And the German lines?

Same. Most duty-free stores don’t have a sugar-free chocolate or a vegan chocolate. They don’t have power protein bars. So we are bringing a range of around ten SKUs from Germany, all high-quality products to meet the demand from that segment of people who are looking for such items.

As I said, we create product that is needed in duty free. Most brands never look at duty free and ask what their customers are looking for… most of the time they simply try to sell what they have.

I’ve been around a long time in this industry and I see our role as a storyteller. I think there are few stories to match yours, Shibu and it’s a largely unsung one. You’re a modest guy and you’ve tended to simply get on with your business and make a big success of it. But tell me, having done precisely that, how do you look back on all those years since that young man from India came to Dubai, full of hope but uncertainty?

You know, yesterday one of my colleagues was asking if 24 years ago I ever envisioned what we would be doing today. I said, “No, never, because I didn’t have that kind of vision for my future.”

It has all been about hard work. That is the one thing I never compromised on right from the beginning. When I started nearly 35 years ago as a door-to-door salesman, I never took anything personally. But when I do a job, I do it to my best ability. So I think that is the one reason I am here today.

I am very happy that I did what I could do within the circumstances which prevailed at that time. I wished to do better than that… so I’m happy to be where I am today.

One of your and my common friends, who I won’t name, was saying, “This kind of brand building happens only once in 100 years.” I’m not talking about today, but ten years down the line, or 20 or 30, if somebody then said, “Shibu made a brand like this, and this is what it is today”, I would be every happy if I could be that one out of a hundred person.

I am from the southernmost part of India, which is called Trivandrum. We say it’s the end of the world. So I say I came from the end of the world to Dubai to make the most of the world known to me now.

We have very high and ambitious plans for our future. So the next ten years will be even more exciting than the last ten. I am very confident and very optimistic about that. I was in first gear, then second gear, then third. Now I’m in top gear so I will be running smoother and faster. ✈