A new chocolate shop and factory coming to Suwanee is aiming to make quality sweets accessible – and to take visitors behind the scenes.
It’s looking like Bitzel’s Chocolate will open around early October, co-founder Raymond Bitzel told What Now Atlanta, and it won’t be your typical chocolate shop. The 7,000-square-foot, custom-built space at 453 Northolt Parkway, building 2, will include an overhead cacao forest, interactive screens with educational content, continually churned gelato and a machine capable of injecting ice cream into chocolate.
Bitzel said the team has been training on demo versions of the equipment in Buffalo, New York.
“If I had a dollar for every time someone said, we’ve never seen that before…” he said. “We’re importing equipment no one’s ever seen before, the city or state has never seen before. It’s been interesting.”
Bitzel’s Chocolate will be doing both retail and wholesale. Customers can get a glimpse of the factory and watch the process from behind the glass, and get even more involved with interactive experiences, like chocolate tastings and truffle making.
“You can put on your chef hat, your chef coat, and you get to be Willy Wonka for a few hours,” Bitzel said.
The business is a larger variation of a small chocolate shop from 20 years ago, he told What Now Atlanta. They did well, even winning competitions and a national packaging award. But they wanted to eventually go bigger and better.
“We decided to wait until we could do it the right way,” he said, of the decision to start building a larger space and full-fledged factory. “It’s been a long time.”
Bitzel’s experience in the chocolate world goes back even further. His parents owned a small chocolate shop, and he helped dip truffles by hand.
Ultimately, they hope to offer quality chocolate and sweets at an affordable price point, giving customers a middle ground between small specialty shops and large corporations.
“One of the reasons we’re doing this is there’s a huge gap between the very small and the Hershey’s,” he said.
