A Conversation With ... Shawn Askinosie

Tell me about Askinosie Chocolate LLC. What is the company’s average yearly production?
I sold my first chocolate bar in May of 2007. Right now, we have about 14 full-time people and produce about 25 metric tons of chocolate each year. That feels like a lot when we are making it; however it’s important to put that in context. The Snickers plant, that makes the fun-size Snickers bars, will do that in about a shift. So in one day, they will produce what takes us a year.

With an influx of manufacturers in the region, it’s been said the Midwest is on the forefront of a chocolate renaissance. Why is that so?
I was recently asked to speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival on that topic. The Midwest is becoming sort of a center point for premium chocolate around the world. It’s interesting how that works, I don’t think the highest-quality “fill in the blank,” has to come from the east or west coasts. It’s not like we are growing cocoa trees here, so really it’s just a question of how we handle the beans once we get them, and that can be done anywhere in the country. There is just some really good-quality chocolate coming out of the Midwest and Chicago and being distributed and sold throughout the world.

For several years now, our distributor in Sweden has purchased more chocolate from us annually than any single customer in the United States. On top of that, we have recently shipped a pretty big order to Switzerland. However, export is becoming less important to us because we are finding it a little more difficult to meet the demands of the United States.

Your company operates under Springfield businessman Jack Stack’s open-book philosophy. Tell me about that practice and why it’s been successful for the company.
Jack has been kind enough to be a friend and mentor over the years, and I practiced that same philosophy as a lawyer, so this is not new to me. When we started the chocolate factory, it was just natural we would apply [practices in Stack’s book] the “The Great Game of Business,” but I wanted to try something new. I wanted to take those principals and apply them upstream to the supplier – in my case – the farmers. I talked with Jack in the beginning about licensing the name and how we would apply those principals to the business.

At the end of each selling cycle – when we get beans they last us about a year – we will then go back to the farmers and provide financial statements in the language they need so they can understand what our revenues and expenses were on those beans. More particularly, what their profit share calculation is, and then we give them cash.

In the beginning, when I started to tell farmers we were going to profit share with them, they had no response. There was almost no understanding of what we were talking about. None of these farmers had ever had direct relationships with chocolate makers before. During the years, the profit sharing has started to make a difference. I was disheartened in the beginning thinking it wasn’t making a difference, but I was just going to do it anyway because I felt it was the right thing to do.

What do you see for the future of Springfield manufacturing?
I think it will be a combination of larger and smaller businesses working together. We have an amazing workforce in the community. I think what we are going to find is that manufacturing will have even greater partnerships with our universities and our manufacturing will become more technologically advanced, giving us an edge over our international competitors. I think we are really ripe for that kind of thing here in the Ozarks because of the number of universities and the educated workforce. I think it’s going to happen up and down the spectrum, and it’s a way to remain competitive.

On a national scale, we need to have a policy that opens free trade with our international competitors so there is a level playing field. I’m speaking specifically about China. We have exported to China in the past, and it wasn’t a great experience. I was able to observe first hand the kind of bureaucracy and red tape the Chinese government puts up to prohibit free trade. I don’t think it’s a level playing field, and the answer is not Americans complaining about jobs going overseas. The answer is beating them at their own game through a level and fair playing field.