Late Easter means long chocolate season for Anderson’s Candy Shop in Richmond

A late Easter is a good thing for Anderson’s Candy Shop in Richmond.

Starting before Valentine’s Day, Katie Anderson-Tedder and the team begin preparing the hand-dipped eggs and solid chocolate bunnies their family has been making since 1919.

[ Anderson's Candy shop makes chocolate eggs, other Easter treats ]

They make all of their chocolates at the store – 30,000 chocolate eggs alone – and keep making them right up to Good Friday but expect to be out of stock by Easter Sunday.

“No one wants to buy Easter candy after Easter, unless its 80% off,” Anderson-Tedder said, adding that “Easter is tricky.”

The Christian holiday’s date changes from year to year, coming on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. That means Easter can fall between March 22 to April 25 – the date it will fall in 2038.

This year, Easter is April 20, giving the Anderson family an extra-long sales window.

“For people in the candy business, we love Easter in late April. That’s more weeks where people have an appetite for marshmallow eggs,” she said.

It’s also the season that carries the business through the leaner summer months. While Richmond gets plenty of summer traffic from Illinoisans driving to the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, area in the summer, it is not necessarily when people think about chocolates.

“They will get a candy bar to eat in the car but they don’t want [extra] candy because it will melt” in a hot vehicle, she said.

A quick Anderson family history: Her great-grandparents opened their Chicago candy store in 1919 but rents went up. In 1926, they heard the McHenry County village was the next up-and-coming suburban boomtown, so they moved the family and shop into the same house in which the shop is still located.

The store and the Andersons are a staple in tiny Richmond, Chain O’ Lakes Chamber of Commerce director Therese Matthys said, adding the family’s involvement and support for nonprofit organizations is also legendary.

“They are selling special Easter baskets to benefit CASA of McHenry County,” Matthys said of the agency that provides advocates to children involved in the court and foster care systems. The store also hosts events Anderson-Tedder organizes to bring people to town, Matthys added.

Anderson-Tedder, now working with her two brothers and her stepmom, are the fourth generation of Anderson chocolatiers. Her father, Leif Anderson, died in June 2021. He got the family into the mail-order chocolate business early on, starting in the 1980s and adding a website in the 1990s, Anderson-Tedder said.

Now Anderson’s has 20 on staff helping to keep locals and customers across the country supplied.

“We help the Easter bunny ... and have customers all over the country. We help the Easter bunny in California, too,” she said.

Because of that customer loyalty, they walk a fine line balancing the cost of ingredients – chocolate, cream, butter and cane sugar – with labor costs and price tags. Chocolate is a commodity, and prices in the past two years have been affected by some of the same forces that coffee roasters have seen, like blight in some chocolate-growing areas and too-wet weather in others.

“Humans are expensive,” Anderson-Tedder said, but any flirtations with automation is shut down by customers. “They beg us, ‘Please don’t change what you are doing.’ They want a human to answer the phone and respond through the website. They want a friendly face in the storefront.”

Other traditions Anderson’s has stuck with are the wax paper bags for their chocolate bars and the bunny molds. The solid chocolate bunnies are made with the same molds her great-grandparents used in 1919.

Customer flavor palates have also changed. Anderson’s doesn’t sell prune jelly or mint mallow eggs anymore. Filbert bars got popular again when they updated the name: Filberts are hazelnuts. The Meltaway Cream bars were not mint, as some clients assumed. Those were renamed too, as Brown Sugar Buttercream, and customers rave about them.

“People eat with their eyes,” and naming the chocolates are a part of that, Anderson-Tedder said.

A recent appearance on WGN has increased online and foot traffic, so Anderson-Tedder encourages customers to order soon.

For the curious, the chocolate eggs are available in both dark and milk chocolate and include peanut butter; coconut; vanilla cream; buttercream; marzipan; pudding cream, which is a chocolate buttercream; marble; maple nut; and fruit and nut.