Edward Marc Chocolatier

My name is Chris Edwards and I am the CEO of Edward Mark Brands. Edward Mark is our family business. It was started in 1914 by my great grandparents and it has evolved over the last hundred years to where we are today. My brother Mark, my sister Dana and myself we primarily run the business and we have different parts of the company that we oversee. As the business continues to grow, my parents are still very involved in the business. We have three different companies. We have Edward Mark Chocolatier with these really beautiful blue boxes that we sell at Giant Eagle and other retailers. And then we have the Milkshake Factory we now have eight locations plus one in the arena. And the t Snappers is an item that my brother and sister created six years ago and it's a pretzel caramel cluster. It's a pretzel turtle. We took out the pecans, added in the pretzels and made it more snackable and it became one of the most popular items carried in retailers across the United States. Being a local Pittsburgh company, were proud to partner with Giant Eagle on Snappers. Snappers, Giant Eagle was one of the first retailers to bring snappers in to give us that shot and were really fortunate that Giant Eagle gave us that shot to be able to carry that product because then we could then take the success that we had at Giant Eagle to be able to grow the business and other retailers around the country. So the chocolate recipe that we use is from my great grandfather that we still use today. My great grandfather came from Greece and my great grandmother came from Greece in 1914. They started selling candy fruit and started chocolate covering them and as most Greek immigrants people were surprised to learn that in western Pennsylvania there were a lot of Greek immigrant families that got into candy making and we maintain those recipes in our family. I still have the recipe books that were handwritten by my great grandfather. So we continue to evolve and twist, put twists on the traditional recipes but we try to maintain and be tried and true to the generations that came before us to be able to grow t Sustainability in the candy industry, most people don't realize that in chocolate it's about poverty, it's about deforestation with the ecosystems changing, it's also about people in these equatorial regions where they grow their cocoa beans. They live in very difficult conditions and that is somet We t Our connection with Giant Eagle is actually a really unique one. It goes back to my great grandparents and to my grandmother where we, our original, our family's original chocolate shop was three doors down from OK Grocers in Lawrenceville. The members of the families would come in and sit in the back booth for lunch and they would actually draw and write their business ideas on the paper placemask and then they would It's a fun business to be in, it's amazing for me to be able to that our family had t