US Chocolate Makers Preparing Unsold Valentine’s Day Chocolates For Export To Israel In 8 Months

Israeli candy retailers ask few, if any, questions of the importer regarding the freshness of these items.

Hershey, PA, February 15 – American manufacturers of specially-shaped chocolate confections for yesterday’s St. Valentine’s Day celebrations have begun the annual process of cataloging, sorting, and warehousing surplus product so that it can be shipped to Israel in the autumn, then sold at suspiciously low prices to local consumers.

Chocolate makers who mass-produce special heart-shaped versions of their standard products for lovers to present to each other on February 14th each year have found a convenient market for their unsold confections: Israeli candy retailers. The latter ask few, if any, questions of the importer regarding the freshness of these items, and the discount they enjoy allows them to price the wares lower than the exorbitant amount normally charged in Israel for the equivalent product in its everyday form.

At the Hershey corporation, which manufactures Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups under its Reese Candy subsidiary, pallets of heart-shaped, chocolate-covered peanut butter confections in their distinctive red foil wrappings are counted, packaged, labeled, and crated, then stowed in the facility’s most remote warehouse to await the order to ship. That order is likely to be issued no earlier than July, but most likely in late September, according to Assistant Plant Manager Manny Fest.

“We can’t know for sure how much surplus product we’re talking about until we get returns from wholesalers, who in turn have to wait for their retailers,” he explained. “That itself takes a while. But the real factor behind the lengthy lead time is that the Israeli importers like to wait until we do the same thing with the Easter Bunny chocolates and chocolate-peanut-butter eggs so they can get everything at once. That means going through the same process during the spring and summer, and only then can everything move out.”

“Then of course it all sits at the port, or on board whatever ship, until they launch,” he continued. “I doubt this product is kept under refrigerated conditions during shipping, and it’s moving during the summer, but hey, that’s already not our problem. We’re more than happy to be able to find a market for unsold inventory.”

The arrangement has worked well for more than ten years, notes Inventory Manager Rich Pagan. “It was kind of weird for a while at first though,” he recalled. “We had these rabbis in here, supervising the manufacturing process of these Christian and idolatrous symbols. Quite a sight. When we asked, they just shrugged and said product is product.”

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