Clasen Quality Chocolates

Clasen Quality Chocolates traces to a European bakery opened in Madison, Wisconsin in 1959 by two recent German immigrant brothers who baked for friends and local neighbours before growing the business into the Clasen Candy Company in 1966, and then, in 1970, into a confectionery-coatings manufacturer in its own right. The company was sold in 1998 by Ralph Clasen to a private owner who took explicit responsibility for maintaining the family character of the business — an arrangement the firm has kept in the years since. Today Clasen Quality Chocolates operates from three Wisconsin manufacturing sites and a Madison innovation centre, and is one of the principal North American suppliers of chocolate and non-chocolate confectionery coatings to the packaged-goods, bakery, ice-cream, and industrial-confectionery industries.

The firm manufactures compound coatings and real chocolate for use as enrobing, moulding, coating, and inclusion in packaged confectionery and bakery products. Its principal customers are consumer-goods manufacturers who use Clasen coatings as an ingredient inside a finished product: chocolate covers on bakery items, coatings on ice-cream novelties, moulded chocolate inclusions in cereal and snack products, and coatings on retail seasonal confectionery. The firm’s product range spans stock formulations shipped in wafer, block, and drop form, custom formulations developed at the Innovation Center against a specific customer specification, and a growing portfolio of speciality products including sugar-free, dairy-free, and organic coatings.

Clasen’s distinguishing position in the North American coatings sector is a combination of scale and single-purpose focus. Unlike the diversified multinational confectionery manufacturers that also sell coatings — for whom coatings are a secondary product line — Clasen is a coatings house, and only a coatings house, whose entire operating discipline is around the specification, formulation, and manufacture of that single ingredient category. That single-category focus underwrites the firm’s role as a reference supplier for coatings-heavy product categories where the coating is the sensory event: the enrobed bakery items, the ice-cream novelties, and the moulded confectionery inclusions in which the coating is what the consumer tastes.