How Thorntons melted away from the high street
Retail has seen a lot of losers disappear rapidly from the high street, but Thorntons’ gradual retreat was years in the making.
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In my view Thorntons has failed to respond to changing tastes in Premium chocolate too. Hotel Chocolat does better as they are concentrating on less sweet, dark chocolate, with fillings/additives which appeal to more sophisticated tastes.
Thorntons has continued to be very sweet, mainly milk chocolate, and the majority of their products are aimed at the childrens market - which is declining when we are all being encouraged to avoid giving children sugary things.
In my view Thorntons has failed to respond to changing tastes in Premium chocolate too. Hotel Chocolat does better as they are concentrating on less sweet, dark chocolate, with fillings/additives which appeal to more sophisticated tastes.
Thorntons has continued to be very sweet, mainly milk chocolate, and the majority of their products are aimed at the childrens market - which is declining when we are all being encouraged to avoid giving children sugary things.
Thornton's chocolate doesn't seem particularly premium to me, certainly not in comparison with the competition. Also, my nearest Thornton's store was a franchise, which I could tell wasn't providing the franchisee with much of a living.
While we're discussing high street premium chocolate, let's give a shout out to Montezuma's.
Thorntons used to be good but they lost the plot when they started using palm oil in their products. Now they are seen as little better than Cadbury's.
As a somewhat older person (whose ferry to school took me past Thornton's Archer Road factory every morning), I remember Thornton's when its shops were lovely and you could choose which chocolates you wanted in your box. Roll on a few years and I moved N of the border for Uni and work and really missed having a Thornton's. Blow me, they must have heard me because one opened on Princes Street. Several years later and qualified, I was working off Fleet Street, really missing my Thornton's and, would you believe it, they opened one there too! This was fantastic - and they even catered for folk like my diabetic colleague. They knew their public somehow.
When the fancy Belgian chocolate shop opened a few doors down a year or two later, people still preferred the Thornton's shop.
They may not realise it but, sadly, their business strategy seems to have been aimed at eroding the huge amount of goodwill I felt bit by bit over the past 20+ years. (They are not the only ones btw.) I didn't mind seeing a few things in the supermarket at special times of the year but this increased so, when they took the self-select option away in the shops, my reasons for visiting became fewer - namely to secure a bag :( , rather than a box, of my most favourite chocolate - the Apricot Parfait. Then they stopped making them - what a low blow. It was a gorgeous combination of dark chocolate with sharp apricot and nutty bits. They brought it back a few years later - rebranded as the Apricot Delice - but it had a gooey sweet apricot part - ugh - where was the piquancy?
Given a choice nowadays, I just buy a box of dark chocolate gingers from whoever rather than anything else - though I quite like a decent dark truffle - but so many have a nasty synthetic tang. Most things sold (not just Thornton's) are just too sweet, not dark enough and don't get me started on those nasty cream Belgian things.
I wish them luck with the online sales and hope they regain that knack they had of knowing what we wanted.
Anyone think the revenue graph and timing of sale looks a bit fortuitous?
I know that new owners may change things that can reduce income, but Ferrero's purchase does look like either extremely bad timing or that the rising sales to that point were not accurate?!
Although, as others have said, the chocolate and the marketing strategy were both dragging the brand down, so maybe Ferrero should have understood the chocolate market in the UK better when they sought to apply their wisdom to the brand.