Sweet Shop USA Sets Guinness World Record in Mt. Pleasant, Texas
From The East Texas Journal, April 2017
By Hudson Old, Publisher
The battle is won, the revolution complete. Surrender of the Europeans is imminent.
“The world’s biggest belong in Texas,” said Sweet Shop USA Commander Michael Moss, the visionary whose forces challenged and prevailed over Italian Choclatier Mirco Della Vecchia.
It was Della Vecchia who in 2012 masterminded construction of a 1,768-pound chocolate truffle recognized as the largest ever by the Guinness Book of World Records. According to scales calibrated to the satisfaction of the recognized authority on world records, Europe’s best lies crushed beneath a ton of solid chocolate in Mt. Pleasant.
“By weight, the retail value would be about $100,000,” said Mr. Moss.
Fame is fleeting and the Texans advanced with purpose beneath the watch of Guinness official Kaitlin Holl, a honed and jealous guard of evidence and facts, polished objectivity.
The record would mean nothing but for the measured cool of Guinness integrity.
The Guinness Book of World Records began as a source to settle bar room bets, wagers between sports in English pubs and roadside taverns.
In the 1950’s Sir Hugh Beaver, Managing Director for London’s Guinness Brewery, attended a hunt in County Wexford and found himself at odds with his hosts, arguing which was the fastest of the game birds of Europe.
Guinness then was known only as a dry stout Irish ale with origins in Dublin. Alford Guinness cooked off his first batch at James Gate Brewery in the late 1700’s. The operation moved to London at the beginning of the Anglo-Irish Trade War in 1932.
Thinking of the lack of reference for settling the bird argument, Sir Hugh had the idea for a Guinness promotion based on the idea of settling arguments and tavern wagers.
In 1954, Sir Hugh employed twins Norris and Ross McWhirter who began research compiling odd facts and singular feats, a 13-week project that launched a best seller eclipsing the fame of the Guinness namesake ale.
The mission today is being the global authority on record breaking.
The Sweet Shop USA mission was inspired.
“Everybody has to buy in,” said Mr. Moss, the President and CEO who brought attention of the Italian record into his weekly meeting of managers.
Founded in Forth Worth in 1972, Sweet Shop USA’s 80,000 square foot facility on Industrial Boulevard is the world’s largest production facility for hand-crafted chocolates. More than 10,000 retailers market their products.
“I knew would could do it,” said Logistics Manager Tasha Furr, home-grown and hand-picked to coordinate production of a 2,000-plus pound truffle. She was the company’s liaison to Guinness offices.
Her understanding of operations began six years ago when she went to work with the artisans on the company production line, the launch of a long trajectory ultimately facilitating work of the company cast for its record-book run.
“There are layers of required documents,” said the project lead who recruited witnesses, booked the independent food inspectors, the credentialed weights and measures offices and provided written records of everything from ingredients to processes, time frames for phases of work and documentary photos validating everything.
If Guinness isn’t out to make it easy, their people made it smooth.
“With Kaitlin guiding us through what Guinness requires, everything made sense,” Tasha said. “Without record keeping and objective documentation, anybody could claim to have done anything. On our end, there was a lot of math in the early stage, working with a familiar recipe to figure volumes, calculate size and work spaces accommodating the number of people involved. Like the math, the Guinness requirements became a part of the process.”
The process transformed required camera crews to real-time historians during the final hours of work. Zooming in from cyberspace, Texans tuned in to social media were among those watching as a ton of chocolate molded the Lone Star State’s Sweet Shop USA into the record book.
