We are re-opening 3 of our Chocolate Houses on Wednesday 17th June
Exciting news! We are planning to re-open our Chocolate Houses in Swanage, Winchester & Horsham on Wednesday 17th June at 9.30am.
We will open our Exeter Chocolate House slightly later once we have the others up & running again - logistically, it is easier for us to head East than West in the short term and we also want to give Exeter as a city a bit of time to get busier again.
We are taking it gently to start with & will only be open 5 days a week from Tuesday to Saturday from 9.30am - 5pm. However, we will be closely monitoring each store and will make changes to days of the week & opening hours in each location where necessary, as we feel our way into this new normal for us all.
We are busy cleaning each Chocolate House and organising hand sanitiser, signs, protective screens & lots of crime scene tape (as we have nicknamed it) to mark 2m distances in each location to ensure that we can do our best to keep you & our teams as safe as possible. We will fewer members of staff on shift at a time to help ensure they can maintain their distance too, so we hope you will bear with us if service is a bit slower than you are used to.
We are also in the middle of a painting project in Winchester as we had to replace the fascia which was damaged in the storms back in February. The logo is due to be fitted early next week & whole frontage is now getting a repaint, as are areas inside too, so we will be looking very spit spot, as Mary Poppins would say!
We will offer a core range of chocolates in our shops (& just in time for Father's Day on Sunday 21st June) & a reduced menu in our cafes for takeaways only. In the short term, please don't expect any toasties, sundaes, chocolate afternoon teas or fondues, but you will be able to pick up a hot chocolate, coffee, tea, milkshake, gelato or cake to go. We will of course review our range as we settle into this new normal and will aim to expand it again as quickly as we can.
When you visit, we just ask that you follow our rules wrt the maximum number of people in at one time, keep your distance using the tape on the floor as a guide & please use contactless to pay for your purchases (even if it's for a small item), as we want to avoid the need for our teams to handle money. We also won't be accepting reusable cups for drinks yet either (& yes that feels a bit weird, but our takeaway cups are fully compostable & do not contain a plastic lining - so that's better than most).
We will continue to offer our local delivery service for Swanage customers who don't want to come in (but now you will talk to the team in the shop rather than Claire,) and local Swanage customers will also be able to use this service to order for collection from the shop. We will also offer a 'Call & Collect' service in our other shops too - more details to follow.
We appreciate that it's going to be very strange for us all to start with as we get used to the new normal, and we will no doubt learn as we go about how best to serve you and may well make changes to our processes as we go.
We are all looking forward to welcoming you from next Wednesday (& later in the month in Exeter). We hope that we will be able to offer enough from our range to keep you happy & lift your spirits with a taste of Chococo again!