Though brick-and-mortar retailers might disagree, eCommerce is supposed to make things simpler. Without the need to pay as much in overhead or labor, profits should soar, right? Well, if the online merchant in question is trying to make billions off of chocolate products, it might be near-impossible unless big changes are made.
The Wall Street Journal explained that chocolate peddlers have found themselves in a sticky situation as the average consumer’s preference for online orders has grown — the product costs more to store and ship than the product itself. For example, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses retails for about $4.25 on the company’s website, but shipping alone costs $6.95. Why? Without extra measures to keep the product from melting in even moderately warm months, customers will open their purchases to find a melted morass of what once was chocolate instead. It’s such a pervasive issue that Hershey recommends that customers also purchase cooling packs and a foam shipping container for an additional $4.99 — bringing the total, with expedited shipping, to $20.20, not including taxes.
“We were talking about it, and our eCommerce team said, ‘We need to find a better solution,’” Eric Zampedri, a packaging engineer for Hershey’s research and development team, told WSJ. “If we can reduce the cost for us, we can reduce it for consumers, too.”
The problem has grown to such a point that Hershey implicitly admitted that it couldn’t solve it on its own by holding an open competition last month for design firms that could produce a lightweight, affordable and temperature change-resistant packaging solution that could ship its chocolate in a near-perfect state over a 48-hour period. The chocolate maker hasn’t announced any results yet, which could mean it’s busy rushing the winning design into production or it’s drowning its tears in a warehouse full of melted chocolate.
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