Dello Mano customers often ask why we wrap all our brownies in foil. The reason for this choice is bound up in the romance I associate with foil-wrapped chocolate. Foil comes off more slowly than modern plastic packaging, and it’s easier to reseal, encouraging more mindful consumption. Its lustrous sheen hints at precious metals, suggesting that chocolate should be held in as high regard as silver or gold. The crinkle of the first tear sounds sweet as Pavlovian bells to those who remember it from childhood. Those too young to remember foil-wrapped chocolate may think of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — that famous scene of Charlie tantalisingly pulling away his chocolate bar’s silver foil to reveal the golden ticket within. That romance is what we lost when the food industry moved to flow wrapping.

To watch the flow-wrapping process in motion is to be truly astounded by the power of modern manufacturing. The naked products speed along a conveyor belt towards a snakelike strip of plastic, long enough to wrap many thousands of chocolates. A separate machine seals and cuts the plastic into separate packages. Through this precisely-engineered process, thousands of chocolate bars can be wrapped without a soul in sight. It is the last step in a process that involves minimal human involvement from beginning to end; the chocolates were mixed, poured, and moulded with similarly efficient marvels of machinery. There’s little wonder that mass-produced chocolate so often tastes so soulless.

By the time I entered the food industry in the 1980s, flow wrapping was already beginning to dominate the industry. However, a few companies still used foil to grant certain products a sense of luxury and old-fashioned quality. One of those companies was Cadbury, which tends to hold on to traditions longer than their competitors; perhaps they remain influenced by the themes of heritage, hard work that characterised their Quaker beginnings. In those days, Cadbury produced a line called Cadbury Favourites, a box of assorted, miniature chocolates each hand-wrapped in patterned foil. Though I was by that time well into adulthood, I felt like a child every time I opened the box to see the bright, colourful foil packages within. (Cadbury still sells their Favourites line, but the tiny chocolates are now — of course — flow-wrapped.)

During my time working with Cadbury, I had the chance to visit a small factory in Tasmania where a tight-knit group of women had been turning out Favourites and other chocolates for decades. Their years of dedication allowed them to develop near-superhuman efficiency. As they worked, their hands moved so fast that they seemed to have far more than two, as if they were multi-armed goddesses of chocolate. Their teamwork and fierce loyalty were even more impressive than their efficiency. Every worker on the conveyor belt knew that she couldn’t slack — if she did, the bars would pile up at her station and hold the whole line back. The familial bond among these women fascinated me; they brought a deep sense of humanity to the chocolate box.

When the time came for us to determine how our own Dello Mano products would be packaged, I remembered the humanity of the Cadbury women, as well as the magic tied up in all the foil-wrapped chocolates of my youth. However, we didn’t have the Cadbury women — in the early days, the Dello Mano permanent staff comprised little more than our four-person family, two of whom were little girls. In order to hand-wrap every brownie we sold, we would need far more massive people-power. Besides, as much as I liked the idea of foil packages, there was no denying that our classic brownies looked beautiful au naturel. We decided to wrap only the centre brownie in each box of nine with gold foil and a tiny ribbon.

Our Dello Mano Brownies as we launched in 2006

This centre brownie would serve as a bit of an engineering fix; the ribbon would help to loosen the first piece from the tightly-packed box. As time progressed, however, we learned that the foil-wrapped brownie was much more than a convenient piece of leverage for our customers. Rather than pulling out the gold brownie first, they would leave it for last, as if it were as precious as its colour suggested. The romance of foil-wrapped chocolate meant more to our customers than a slightly easier-to-open package; in fact, we received frequent requests to wrap all of the brownies in foil. We began hand-wrapping all of our brownies as soon as we had enough woman-manpower to do so.

Today, we continue to wrap each and every Dello Mano brownie that leaves our kitchens. Every jewel-toned hue corresponds with one of our delicious flavours, from the jewel-toned purple that wraps our Ginger brownies to the scintillating silver enveloping our Espresso Walnut. And, of course, as always our original Classic Luxury Brownie comes wrapped in gold foil, because our painstakingly-developed browine recipe is as precious to us as gold. As soon as you try your first bite, we think you’ll feel the same.

Got a story to tell us about your Dello Mano Brownie experience – just send us a note on our Facebook page – look forward to hearing from you.

Dello Mano led the Australian Brownie Revolution. You can find our brownies online http://www.dellomano.com.au or at either one of our Brisbane Stores – Tattersalls Arcade or New Farm. We have tasters every day and look forward to seeing you there.

Dello Mano at 5,300 m: Bringing Brownies to Everest Base Camp

We love hearing about how our customers incorporate Dello Mano into the most memorable moments of their lives. Since our founding in 2006, our premium luxury brownies and cakes have been present at countless events, from birthday parties and bar mitzvahs to weddings and proposals. Some of our customers have found particularly novel ways to involve Dello Mano in their memory-making moments. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some of our favorite stories from the Dello Mano archives.

This story belongs to a customer we’ll call Alice, who visited our former Doggett Street store to regale us with the role Dello Mano played in her fortieth birthday. The big four-oh isn’t just any birthday, and this wasn’t just any party: she and her husband took the opportunity to fulfill their lifelong dreams of climbing Mount Everest. After all, if you have to go over the hill, why not go over the biggest one the world has to offer?

They bought their plane tickets, booked their guides, and collected all the necessary gear. Then there was the question of how they would have a birthday party on Mount Everest. A cake was out of the question — they would carry all that they needed on their backs, and every extra gram would feel like a kilo. Besides, the windy, oxygen-thin Himalayan atmosphere is no place to try to light a birthday candle. Alice wanted a treat that could pack pounds of decadence into a cubic centimeter, the dessert with the greatest deliciousness density possible. Then she thought of Dello Mano brownies.

Alice was a fervent fan of Dello Mano well before we opened our shops at Tattersalls and New Farm. She first tasted our brownies at the Farmers Market at New Farm Park, where we still have a stand nestled among the avenue of trees. One bite of our Classic Belgian Chocolate Luxury Brownie and Alice fell fast and hard. Each piece of our Classic Brownie was a cubic inch of rich chocolate bound together with the finest farm-fresh ingredients, so compact and carefully-engineered that it could serve as the world’s most luxurious astronaut food. Perhaps Alice thought of astronauts, or perhaps she had heard that scientists in Antarctica snack on chocolate because it handles the freezing temperatures better than most foods. Either way, she recognised that the Classic brownie cubes were tailor-made for her journey, so much so that it was almost as though we had anticipated it.

Alice and her husband trekked for over two weeks through the Nepali countryside, a jagged landscape punctuated by bustling Sherpa villages and quiet monasteries, before they reached Everest Base Camp. It was one of the most challenging hikes they had ever completed, and it was only the first leg of a journey that would take nearly two months. Through all glute-pounding climbs, the gasping for breath in the thin air, the throbbing in her feet at the end of the day, Alice never forgot that this was the easy part. Nor did she forget the Dello Mano brownie.

It was Alice’s fortieth birthday when they arrived at the base camp. She and her husband clambered up a well-situated rock, one where they could look down upon where they had been and crane their necks up at where they had yet to go. Finally, ceremoniously, Alice took the brownie out of her pack. She pulled at a corner of the gold foil to reveal the intensely dark, warm color of the chocolate within. She felt her heart beating faster, and it wasn’t just the altitude sickness.

The brownie had frozen, though its richness prevented it from becoming rock-hard; it had something of the consistency of very cold ice cream. Her husband unsheathed his knife and sliced off thin slivers, which curled like ribbon as they fell into her hands. She placed it a slice on her tongue and let it slowly melt. Suddenly, she felt she was in New Farm Park again, among the roses and the jacaranda, falling in love with Dello Mano for the first time. The brownie recalled that first summer memory, but it also tasted of achievement. She took another sliver and relished her accomplishments, not only on their climb but in all her forty years.

“Happy birthday, Alice,” her husband said.

Alice gazed over the snowy expanse, the taste of Belgian chocolate lingering on her tongue. For once, she felt sure of her decisions and her direction in life. After all, she had certainly decided to carry the right brownie to Mount Everest!

If you have a Dello Mano Classic Brownie story to share with us then please do so by sharing on our Facebook Page – we’ll reward a random Dello Mano story with a box of the original and the only Classic Brownie. Invented right here in Brisbane, the Dello Mano Luxury Classic Brownie paved the way for brownies in Australia.