Our annual Best of Boca cover is one of the most difficult to execute. As a conceptual cover, our team needs to find a way to encapsulate the spirit of Boca Raton in new and innovative ways, and having done this for decades, sometimes it feels like we’ve run out of ideas.
Never!
While in a planning meeting, our managing editor John Thomason suggested we use a box of chocolates with “Best of Boca” written out on each bonbon. And with Norman Love Confections expanding to Delray Beach and Boca Raton, we knew who to ask to create the chocolates.
After chatting with founder and pastry chef Norman Love, we discovered this wasn’t as easy of an ask as we thought. Making the chocolates you could mistake for jewels was the easy part—the challenge for our cover was the lettering. It wasn’t something they normally did, and it was important to Love that they executed it meeting their own standards, especially for a magazine cover.
“We’ve built a company on integrity, attention to detail, and creating a really high-end luxury ultra premium product, and now we’re tasked with trying to handpaint a letter that would be identical to each of the other letters,” Love explained. “They had to be free-handed using a paint brush, and the ‘paint’ is colored cocoa butter.”
Love’s two pastry artists played with the hand painting in their factory in Fort Myers. Thankfully, with “extremely high-level artistic ability,” they determined they could execute the lettering. They painted “Best of Boca” in uppercase lettering, then made an assortment of their signature colorful chocolates to surround the lettered pieces—blue squares with yellow droplets, a green-and-yellow ombre shell, ruby red baubles.
Then came the next challenge: transportation. While Norman Love Confections now has boutiques in Boca Raton and Delray Beach, their factories are located on the West Coast.
“Now with eight retail stores we have the ability to ship chocolate anywhere in the United States,” Love said, adding that they ship 100,000 packages around the country annually.
However, ”We wanted to make sure the chocolate arrived perfectly … We were traveling across the state to our Delray store anyway. It was the best way to ensure that they got to you safely and in perfect condition.”
The chocolates were packed with frozen gel packs (dry ice is too cold for chocolate) in a temperature-controlled carton, then hand-delivered to the Boca magazine office.
Now in our possession, we had to keep the chocolate fresh for the next two days before our photoshoot. Everyone in the office was given instructions to keep the office at a lower temperature (refrigerators are too cold and dry out chocolate) as well as to not sneak a bite of chocolate (the hardest ask).
Finally, it was show time—Boca magazine art director Lori Pierino worked alongside longtime photographer Aaron Bristol to style the chocolates. In the box, out of the box, different sized boxes, on different colored plates. If you’ve ever seen a Norman Love Confections box of chocolates, it’s easy to see why the photos tucked away in the boxes made the final cut. With its vibrant colors, thick paper stock, and unique closure, they’re works of art in themselves.
“When you’re in the luxury business and the luxury gifting business, the packaging is an important part of the overall expectation and experience,” Love explained. “The way you receive Tiffany’s or a Louis Vuitton, you’re experiencing a luxury product with beautiful packaging that creates that ‘wow’ for the recipient.”
And we hope a “wow” for our readers. Enjoy our Best of Boca issue!
