Hand-dipped chocolates. A family tradition.
In 1917 Grandma became a professional chocolate dipper. Since then, four generations of her children and grandchildren have been instructed in the techniques of hand dipping chocolates and making quality candies. Today there are few true chocolate dippers and candy makers. These skills are fast becoming lost arts. Our Avenues storefront was opened in 2003 to ensure that our family’s strong tradition of candy making survives and is passed on to many more generations to come. Speed and mass production have resulted in the development of “copies”, but can never replace the uniqueness of the real thing. If you receive a gift of our hand dipped candies, you can be assured that the giver considers you special. That person wanted you to enjoy some real quality candy and a taste of the past before it is gone forever. We hope that you agree that it was worth their effort.
Welcome to Hatch Family Chocolates. I'm Steve Hatch, one of the owners here. I have the best life. I eat chocolate every day. I think I open a chocolate shop because chocolate was always in my family. During the Depression, a lot of chocolate factories hired women to actually come in and hand-dip chocolates. So she would do that all day long and then at the end of her shift, she would rub off all the chocolate that she put on her rubber apron and take it home. And that'she thought my father had chocolate and it was just in my life. My ex-wife, Katie, her family ran restaurants in Chicago and her and I were trying to figure out what we wanted to do and we just combined the two. Some of the best moves that we did when we opened up our shop were just to open. And I think sometimes you never start because you're still trying to be perfect and you'll never obtain that. And I think the best thing we did was just to turn on the stupid open sign and just start a business. The challenges are, You're not going to see the trends change. And I think it's really important to actually keep evolving. We actually told them no a few times. We didn't want to do it. And they kept pounding us. And at the time the economy wasn't ranking. And we just, we decided to do it. The biggest reason we decided to do a show on TLC was that you couldn't overcome. And it was And yeah, that was incredible. The natives were pretty much outweighed by all the positives of just all the new people that we could meet. And again, we made really crazy things. We made So those kind of things were really cool. We still get people from, And that's what's amazing to me. We had outgrown our small location within the first year or two of being open. And we wanted to stay in the avenues. This neighborhood's really important to us. So there weren't a lot of locations that we could move to. And this whole grocery store ended up coming onto the market. And so we bought it and we did it. We're, I mean, we almost went bankrupt. We almost lost the whole building. We almost lost everything. I think we'll always make mistakes. And I think most businesses do. My biggest thing is I'm not afraid to admit that we make mistakes. And that's not necessarily a bad thing if you learn from it. And if there's lessons to be learned, I actually think that it's really important to make mistakes just to make yourself better and to continually improve. It would have been nice to have moved into a building with hundreds and thousands of dollars and have that to spare. But it wouldn't be the same. I wouldn't appreciate this building. The community came out and supported it. But we ended up having an investor that bought the building. And that's the main reason. It saved our job. We do things trying to bring the community together. And I think that's what's really important, extra amount of focus. We kind of provide a place for you to come get that warm, fuzzy feeling. And the products that we sell are just ways to give you that. But it's just to make you forget about all your problems in school or whatever it is, whether it's worth or whatnot. Because I think that's important. I think that's what makes a neighborhood are the businesses that actually contribute back to the community. Otherwise, what are you there for?
