Media Relations for Craft Chocolate Makers: Identifying Your Company’s Stories
by David Nilsen
Welcome to my Media Relations for Craft Chocolate Makers series! As a food and beverage journalist, I have communicated with thousands of breweries, distilleries, restaurants, chocolate makers, and other businesses, and I’ve seen ones who maximize their relationships with media members and outlets, and ones who are leaving opportunities on the table. Additionally, my wife and business partner, Melinda Guerra, is a freelance PR professional helping brands tell their stories and connect with media. In this series, the two of us will be sharing what we’ve learned over our careers to help craft chocolate companies of any size identify their stories, communicate them to media members and outlets, gain new customers, and keep the ones you have curious.
In part 1 of this series, we talked about why media relations is so important no matter the size of your chocolate business, and why you need to have a strategy for it. It doesn’t matter if you’re your only employee or you have a hundred employees, this is both relevant and accessible.
Today we’re going to talk about identifying stories. First though, let’s talk about what media coverage actually is, because while you might have one particular thing in mind when you think about media coverage, media opportunities are quite varied, both in terms of format and content.
Media outlets can be local, national, or international, they can be primarily shared in print, online, or via video or audio, and they can be a formally recognized news source or something more grassroots. A few are craft chocolate-specific, but for most, you’re going to need to do more work to identify why they should cover you.
If you recognize the importance of working with media members and outlets to share stories about your company, you likely have specific things you want them to share with their audience. It can be easy to think about media coverage as a form of free advertisement. And while it’s true there can be some overlap in benefits—most notably visibility—between media coverage and advertising, they aren’t the same thing. It’s important to understand the distinctions and have accurate expectations when you’re going into this.
In Melinda Guerrra’s work as a PR professional, she works on her clients’ behalf to get their stories or news out to media outlets. Depending on the needs and desires of a client, that might mean paid placements, but more often means organic coverage of some kind.
“In exchange for payment, the client gets complete control over the messaging in an advertisement,” she explains. “They get to choose the photos, title, tagline, and actual language for the ad, and often even when it runs. Free media coverage is different. When you get media interested in a story, they tell that story for you. You lose control over copy and details, but you gain a reliable messenger, and that’s really important. We call this earned media. There’s also actual news coverage for when you’re hosting an event, or have a big release. So you want to keep in mind these three types of potential media coverage: paid advertisements, earned media, and news coverage.”
Advertising can obviously play a really important role in getting the word out about your craft chocolate company, but it’s not what we’re focused on in this series. We’re focusing on the latter two categories Melinda talked about: earned coverage and news coverage.
The lines between those two types of coverage can be a bit blurry, but the easiest way for me to think about them is that news coverage generally has an identifiable call to action, and earned media does not. A call to action is something you’re hoping a person will do based on the information you’ve just presented to them. Maybe it’s attending an event, or checking out your new location, or purchasing a product. Earned coverage usually does not have a specific call to action (though you obviously hope people will become customers because of it). Instead of a call to action, you could say earned media coverage has a call to curiosity.
In the next episode we’re going to talk all about how to build a media list - who to put on it, how to contact them, etc. But first, we have to identify the stories we want to tell before we initiate those interactions with the media.
A story list is a massive list of things that are interesting about what you do, and might be of interest to a media member or outlet. Usually when someone begins creating a list like this, they start out struggling to think of a few things, and then start seeing all the threads and angles, and suddenly they’re thinking of ideas faster than they can write them down. As we discussed in the first episode in this series, chocolate intersects with so many other aspects of life, and all of those intersections provide potential ideas for stories.
Let’s look at examples. A lot of these won’t be unique to your craft chocolate company, but this is one way in which the craft chocolate’s visibility problem in the broader culture can actually work to your advantage: you can be the point of entry for a media member or outlet the discover and learn about the industry.
When you’re working in craft chocolate day after day, especially in production, it can be easy to gather all the details of your work up into a single concept, but any one of those individual details might be noteworthy to someone unfamiliar with how and why craft chocolate is made. The trick is to step back from what you do every day and start looking at your work through the eyes of someone who’s never heard of craft chocolate, or who is new to it and just discovering what’s involved. What would make them pay attention to you? What is it that stops you from scrolling to pay attention to a business or individual in a field you’re unfamiliar with?
Here are just a few places to look when you’re brainstorming story ideas:
Agriculture - Cacao farming, botany, agribusiness, soil science
Ecology - Sustainable farming, climate change, farm waste, production waste
Sensory science - Tasting process, judging
Food & cooking - Food production, supply chain, culinary traditions, flavor formulation, inclusion ingredients
Collaborators - Their stories, their ingredients - talked all about this in the collaboration series
Art and design - Packaging, logo, local artists, materials, cafe concept & decor
Branding - Business name, colors, bar names
Local history & architecture - Your building, your neighborhood, your city, local foodways
Finance, business, & economics - Tariffs, taxes, local laws, cost of ingredients
Manufacturing - Processes, equipment, supply chain, DIY fixes, energy usage
Labor & management - Training, leadership, succession planning, education
Non-profits & community organizations
Awards - Your wins, judging process
People - Founders
— Your professional and educational backstory
— Your hometown
— Your personal or cultural journey
— Minority status
— How you started the business
— Your other interests & hobbies
— Your creative pursuits outside chocolate
People - Staff
— With permission - any of the above
Craft chocolate’s broader stories
See how far rich the soil is for stories to tell?
Now it’s time to for you to make a giant, no-wrong-answers list of all the possible stories connected to your business. You can start with the prompts above, but keep going - we only scratched the surface. Make this a sprawling, wild list of stories, and pay particular attention to the stories that aren’t dependent on someone’s involvement with or knowledge of the craft chocolate industry. And don’t just do this yourself: ask you staff, family, friends, and even customers to share with you what’s interesting about your company.
In the next entry in this series, we’ll talk about another list you need to make—a media list—and after that we’ll look at how to begin connecting these lists by sharing your story ideas with media members and outlets. But for now? Get started on a story list.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Media Relations for Craft Chocolate Makers series
Podcast Episodes
Why You Need a Media Plan
Identifying Your Company’s Stories
How to Build and Manage a Media List
How to Write and Send a Press Release
How to Maintain Media Relationships and Communicate New Stories
How to Get Started, and Common Pitfalls
Blog Posts
Why You Need a Media Plan
How to Identify Your Stories (you’re reading it!)
How to Build and Manage a Media List
How to Write and Send a Press Release
How to Maintain Media Relationships and Communicate New Stories
How to Get Started, and Common Pitfalls