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The 2015 European Candy Kettle Club Award recipient, Jean-Luc Grisot of Valrhona, believes that intense and personal involvement on all fronts - be it in the fi elds, in the lab, in the plant or with the customer - results in better chocolate and a better company.
How does one improve upon a storied chocolate company specifically created for pastry chefs without being a pastry chef? For Jean-Luc Grisot, the answer was pretty simple: Manage with a hu - man touch. Indeed, when he joined Tain l'Hermitage, France-based Valrhona in 2001 as its managing director, Grisot quickly recognized that there was plenty of passion geared toward producing the best possible chocolate.
To harness that passion in a manner that would prove productive for both the company and employees, he believed it was important to add a "humanistic" approach to operations. As he points out, "the success of Valrhona stems from the success of its employees."
As a result, all of the company's projects are shared with its employees. Acknowledging that it takes time to explain all the strategies and initiatives, Grisot says "it's impossible to obtain results without a humanistic approach."
The managing director points to the company's double-digit growth during the past four years, punctuated by strong profits each of those years, as evidence.
"That's the reason why we're not financially oriented," he explains. "Our success is a result of this humanistic approach. We provide an environment where people have the freedom to work, to share in a project. Consequently, when we let employees invest them - selves into a project and the company, the results are very good."
He cites the company's introduction of Dulcey, the company's blond-colored chocolate, several years ago as a classic example of employee involvement and persistence. Dulcey, which was intro - duced in 2013, represents more than eight years of research and testing by company's R&D department as well as its L'Ecole Valrhona school system.
As the story goes, in 2005 Frederic Bau, the company's executive pastry chef, was demonstrating a recipe for visiting professionals at the company's L'Ecole Valrhona in Tain L'Hermitage. Upon finishing, he forgot about a white chocolate that was warming in a water bath. Only after returning to the kitchen 10 hours...