Made in Armenia: Sweet smell of chocolate

The irresistible aroma of pure dark chocolate swept over Emil Harutyunyan during a visit to a trade show of bread and pastry-manufacturing equipment in France. He had come from Armenia to buy machines for making French bread and croissants. But the smell was so sweet and the chocolate-making process so captivating that he changed his plans.
At the time, in the early 2000s, high-quality chocolate was unavailable in Armenia. The country only had Russian-made compound chocolate, a combination of cocoa, sweetener, and vegetable fat that’s cheaper than the real thing. So, in 2004, Harutyunyan started Arcolad, a small producer of European-style chocolate.
The first five years were challenging. “It took some time for people to get used to high-quality chocolate,” says Margarita Harutyunyan, Arcolad’s marketing and external relations manager (and the founder’s wife).
“They also weren’t used to the European-style ‘ballotins,’ the boxes our chocolates come in,” she adds. “For Armenians, the large, flat, Soviet-style chocolate boxes were considered fancy. They had to get used to the new design. But then chocolate lovers began to understand that our chocolate was the real thing, that it was fresh and without additives.”
Arcolad imports its equipment from Germany, Belgium and Italy and its packaging materials from Germany and Switzerland. Most of the raw materials for the chocolate come from Belgium. The marzipan comes from Germany and the walnuts and dried fruits (apricots, peaches and plums) are grown in Armenia.
As demand grew, Arcolad (a combination of Armenia and shocolad) needed to expand production. In 2021, the company took a loan of 40 million Armenian drams (nearly €40 000 by today’s exchange rate) from a local bank that had, in turn, received financing from the Armenian Central Bank, through a European Investment Bank credit line specifically intended for small and medium-sized firms.
The chocolatier later took two other loans under that credit line, in 2021 and 2023.
“After a disastrous year in 2020, with the pandemic and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, we needed something to keep us going,” says Margarita Harutyunyan. “The loans were important to us, to ensure our stability. We overcame the financial difficulties we faced at that moment and we moved on.”
Now the company exports chocolate to the United States and Europe, and recently opened a US distribution subsidiary that’s expected to begin operating in 2024.
About 70% of Arcolad’s employees are women and more than half of management positions are filled by women. Thanks to the financing, the company has grown to 48 employees and is building a new factory that will enable it to multiply its production by a factor of ten.
“The new place, which we hope to complete in the spring, will be located outside Yerevan,” says Margarita Harutyunyan. “We’ll be able to hire more women from the surrounding small towns.”