Masterful merchandising: chocolate retailing pros talk tips and tactics.

To merchandise chocolate most effectively, take a multi-sensory approach, recommends chocolate maker, author and pastry chef Jacques Torres, who operates two highly regarded chocolate retail shops in New York City.

"People approach the counter with their taste buds, their eyes, their cognitive

"Taste rules over everything," Torres continues, "but since most places require a purchase before a taste, the initial purchase is made with senses other than taste."

Thus, "Names of products are just as important as tastes of products during the selling process," he points out.

Store configuration and product positioning within it also play key roles in retailing chocolate. It's important for shoppers to be able to navigate a store quickly and to easily find their chocolate of choice.

So when Fannie May Confections set out to remodel and expand its flagship store in downtown Chicago, the design team devoted considerable attention to improving "in-store navigation" and making it easy to locate favorite confections in the store, reports Jan Waanders, director of marketing for Fannie May, which currently operates 52 stores in four Midwestern states.

"The 80/20 rule always applies," continues Waanders. "So we've especially highlighted that 20 percent of the SKUs (stock keeping units) that account for 80 percent of the volume."

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Now top-selling Fannie May lines are merchandised in single destinations within the store with eye-catching signage to direct shoppers to that location. "If we have Pixies or Trinidads in a certain aisle," says Waanders, "we have a shingle above that, depicting the product."

The virtues of simplicity

The keep-it-simple rule applies to more mainstream retail channels as well. Premium chocolate bars can present a particular challenge, notes Laurie Roberts, who as director of sales and marketing for Boulder, Colo.-based Chocolove, has spent considerable time analyzing chocolate bar sets at retail.

Keeping a set both well organized and visually appealing is a challenge, she notes. For one thing, some bars are packaged to sit vertically on the shelf, while others sit horizontally. Then there's the fact that shoppers tend to browse the section and often change purchase plans midstream, plunking down the bar they've opted not to buy without bothering to ensure that it's put back in the right place.