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If you were to imagine the leader of Australia’s oldest chocolate factory, the archetype of Willy Wonka (flamboyant, whimsical, mad genius) is difficult to resist. Peter Millard, a supply chain officer by trade (bespectacled, bookish, a little awkward) doesn’t pretend to be anything of the sort.
“I’m a mathematician. I sit there and think about squares,” said Millard, the newly installed chief executive of Haigh’s Chocolates.
But it’s not cocoa truffles he’s referring to: building a business, he explains, is like building out an ever-expanding cube.
Haigh’s Chocolates’ new chief executive Peter Millard is the first CEO appointed from outside the Haigh family in the business’s 110-year history.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong
“You’re not just growing in one dimension or another, you’re growing in three, four, five, six dimensions,” Millard said. “Complexity is the big thing.”
As Haigh's grows its national footprint to 22 with the opening of its newest store in Sydney’s Broadway, Millard has been quietly re-engineering the unglamorous, business back-end of the 110-year-old chocolate maker famous for its rows of handmade truffles, chocolate frogs, speckles and bars encased behind gleaming wood-panelled glass shelves.
His appointment to the top job marks the first time since Haigh’s was founded in 1915 that it has been led by someone outside the company. Having spent nearly two decades at the Adelaide family business, Millard has witnessed the teething pains that come with producing 1120 tonnes of chocolate a year from 400 tonnes, and managing a workforce that has quadrupled to 800.
Despite doubling stores and sales to over $100 million in the past decade, growth has been gradual and unhurried. In a techno-centric world galloping towards automation and artificial intelligence, the chocolate business depends unswervingly on human hands and muscle memory.
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“There are customers out there who love our product, but it’s not just turning on a tap,” said Millard.
“When you’re a real craft manufacturer like we are, we can’t just say we’re going to sell more. You’ve actually got to build the skills in the people that make the chocolate, and that’s a lot of training and skill development.”
A team of 200 chocolatiers – many of whom have worked at the chocolate factory for over a decade – will take cocoa sourced from certified farms in Ghana and Peru and then clean, roast, ground, temper and mould chocolate in small batches, “like you’d make it in your kitchen”, says Millard, before it’s hand-packed, sealed, and shipped for sale.
“People held on to their skills really tightly. They were like, ‘I don’t want to train you, because then you can do my job.’ We had to actually break that,” he said.
“But that takes time, it takes confidence, it takes culture. We are still very artisan, so that’s that’s our challenge today.”
Chocolate prices hit record highs at the beginning of the year and have since eased, but remain about three times higher than the long-term average, says the chief executive. Yet it’s wages, not cocoa, that is the bigger factor behind the company’s price rises of 25 per cent over four years.
When lockdowns ended and everyone returned to work, the Haigh’s factories were pushed to capacity, prompting Millard to invest $130 million in a new manufacturing facility that has been designed to double sales over the next 10 years – incrementally, and without any fancy new machines.
“We want to buy stuff that can make it the way we used to make it. We’ve had to buy really simple and really flexible equipment,” said Millard.
The new $130 million Haigh’s production and warehouse facility at Salisbury in northern Adelaide spans 36,000 square metres.
“We don’t want to get there in a day. We want to get there over a few years, because we can’t outpace the talent that we bring in.
“We’re owned by a family who continue to say ‘we’re in this for the long term’. This is not about short-term profits.”
Grow slow
It’s what Haigh’s don’t, or won’t, do that make them interesting. John Haigh, the father of Alister, Millard’s predecessor, decided decades ago not to sell through supermarkets to maintain control of their product and evade knotty price negotiations. You won’t find Haigh’s at airports or anywhere else outside their high-end retail stores or website.
Haigh’s high-end retail stores are only in Australia.
The chocolate maker also isn’t rushing to make a name abroad. Despite a bit of light-hearted chocolate diplomacy two years ago by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who attempted to gift some Haigh’s to Swiss counterpart Ignazio Cassis, who proffered some Lindt in response, growing internationally isn’t really on the agenda.
“We see ourselves as being one of the world’s best chocolatiers,” said Millard. But there’s plenty more room to grow in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, he said.
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“We don’t imagine we’re going to be a global brand. We’re going to be a great Australian brand, until we run our limit out of that.
“If we want to make ourselves 10 times bigger, that is going to lose something. We’ve got to be careful, we’ve got to be steady.”
Over the decades, supermarket aisles have become more crowded and competition is fiercer, but the legacy of Haigh’s will endure on its refusal to compromise its hand-made process, Millard indicated.
“Twenty years ago, the product you’d buy in the supermarket was a lot closer to the product you might buy in Haigh’s … I think they’re getting further apart,” he said.
“We want to make sure that when people in Australia [have] got a guest from Switzerland, they say, ‘Well, you can come and see our chocolate shop, and it’s pretty special.’ ”
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