Not a day goes by when I don't have a bit of chocolate. I'm always trying new products and there's chocolate in every kitchen here. You've got to be nuts about chocolate if you work at Thorntons. I've been here for 10 years and I just never get bored with it.
For me, Christmas is 365 days of the year. I work as a senior project developer and I'm lucky to be involved in lots of different things. We live and breathe Christmas.
It's easy to come up with new ideas. All we need is some chocolate and some great people around, and we're half way there. We do the whole range, from advent calenders to all the other sweets and specialities. There's just so much you can do with chocolate.
We work about a year in advance, so we're thinking about next Christmas already. We start off researching trends and we go out at Christmas time to see what customers are buying. Then we go into idea generation, and come up with new products. So this year it was the snowman and "the snowdog" range. We get a lot of feedback from our customers, so it's always good to look at that when you're developing new ideas.
Once you've worked with chocolate, you can't not work with it. I remember the first time I went into a chocolate shop. That feeling has never left me. I started off working on the website side of things and was lucky enough to have a manager who could see that my skills weren't completely being fulfilled. I moved into product developing and then to Christmas.
It's a great feeling when the first santa comes off the production line. Our office is in Derbyshire and the factory is just across the road, so I go to every first run on the production line. Everyone is a proper chocoholic here. And I never get sick of Christmas, it just becomes part of you. When Christmas Day finally comes, it's even more exciting.
For our popular chocolates, we just give them a bit of a Christmas make-over. So we might have a little dusting of snow – icing sugar – and a little robin on top. It is sometimes about packaging too. A bit of sparkle makes everything look lovely at Christmas time.
The market has expanded, because people have a child-like wonder about Christmas. So to have a grown-up advent calender is lovely. I don't have a favourite chocolate, but I do love my advent calender because I get a different type of chocolate every day.
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