Julia Zotter has been Managing Director of Zotter-Schokolade GmbH since March 2026. But this is hardly a radical generational change. Major decisions have long been made together as a family, and her parents remain involved in the company.
In this interview, Julia Zotter discusses the transition within the family business, rising raw material costs, direct cocoa sourcing, Zotter Shanghai and her experiences in cocoa-producing countries.
Today, the company employs 230 people, more than 100 of whom have been with Zotter for over ten years. Every production step takes place at its own factory in Styria, from cocoa bean to finished chocolate bar. This commitment isn’t a marketing decision. It stems from a visit to a cocoa plantation in Nicaragua in 2004.
Along the way came a chapter Julia Zotter herself describes as bittersweet: building a Chocolate Theatre in Shanghai. What began as the much smaller idea of an online shop eventually took shape in a former shirt factory. The pandemic severed her connection with the business there and forced her to learn something she had always found difficult.
I spoke with Julia Zotter about responsibility and learning to let go, about caramel that stubbornly refuses to turn out right, about the relationship between cocoa prices and the price of a chocolate bar, and about what she hopes visitors take away besides chocolate.
“Not That Much Has Changed”
You became Managing Director on March 1, while your father remains involved in the company. What have you changed in your first few months, and where have you noticed the difference between a handover on paper and one in everyday business?
Not that much has changed, because all four of us are still involved in the company. Just because you retire doesn’t mean you have to stop doing the things you enjoy. What you do notice is that my parents are taking more time for themselves now and allowing themselves to go home earlier.
What surprised me was how quickly official correspondence started being addressed to me, and just how much of it suddenly arrived.
My brother and I have already helped shape the company over the past few years. We’ve always discussed major decisions as a family and made them together. So I don’t feel the need to change anything fundamental now. I want to guide the company into the future.
We now have 230 employees, and more than 100 of them have been working with us for over ten years. That means I can rely on a tremendous amount of experience, which is very important to me.
The Caramel That Just Won’t Work
Zotter experiments with a lot of ideas. Can you tell me about one that made it into development but never reached the market?
Caramel has a special place in my heart. Hardly a year goes by without us launching a new caramel variety. It has so many different flavour nuances and combines beautifully with other ingredients.
This year, for example, we developed raspberry caramel and orange caramel. But I’ve been working on a recipe for creamy vegan caramel for many years, and it simply won’t work. We already have vegan varieties containing vegan caramel, but a pure caramel variety hasn’t worked out so far. It breaks my heart a little that I still haven’t found a solution. At least, not yet.
Caramel might sound rather traditional at first, but it doesn’t have to be. Another slightly unusual variation, involving caramelised chicken skin and salted egg yolk, is also on hold for now. It still needs some fine-tuning.
Cocoa, Crises and the Question of Price
Cocoa prices are currently fluctuating considerably. How does a manufacturer that sources cocoa directly calculate costs under these conditions? And how quickly do falling global market prices actually affect your own purchasing prices?
We buy cocoa beans from 15 different countries, from Latin America and the Caribbean to East Africa. We’re always looking for rare, traditional cocoa varieties that are often cultivated only in small quantities. Organic and fair trade certification are essential requirements.
High-quality cocoa isn’t traded on the commodity exchange. It commands a relatively stable, high price. That means we’re not directly affected by fluctuations in exchange prices, because good quality has always been more expensive.
What does create difficulties for us, however, is the uncertainty caused by crop failures. You can’t calculate for that, and you can’t simply rely on the next harvest producing the expected yields.
Raw material costs also account for only a relatively small part of the price of chocolate. Machinery, wages in Austria and energy prices have a significant impact on the retail price as well. We carry out every processing step here at our factory in Styria, produce many items by hand and pay salaries and taxes in Austria. That’s a major cost factor compared with industrial companies producing in low-wage countries.
When has your commitment to sourcing and fairness most recently cost you a significant amount of money, or even led you to abandon a product?
We’ve been affected by multiple crises for several years now. Sometimes it’s cocoa, then nuts become scarce, and another year fruits such as raspberries suddenly cost several times as much.
We therefore have to calculate very carefully and assess what remains financially reasonable. But we’ve never considered lowering our quality. That’s simply not an option for us.
Despite rising prices, we use only pure cocoa butter, never other vegetable fats. Nor would we change our recipes simply to replace certain ingredients or reduce their proportion.
Shanghai: From an Online Shop to a Former Shirt Factory
You’ve described your time in Shanghai as a bittersweet experience. How did Zotter end up going to China in the first place?
The original idea really was to open an online shop. I flew to Shanghai with my father back in 2012 to look at potential premises.
We saw several properties, including a former shirt factory. Of course, it was far too big for an online shop. But we immediately fell in love with the building, its history and its architecture. The location seemed perfect for a Chocolate Theatre.
We couldn’t let go of the idea of making Zotter chocolate something people could experience in Shanghai, rather than simply buy. And so the former shirt factory became the Zotter Chocolate Theatre, with a shop, cinema, tasting tour and, of course, an online shop too.
We were convinced that this immersive experience in particular would make us stand out in Shanghai.
You’ve said that, looking back, you were somewhat naive when you went to China. What did that naivety involve?
That “naivety” was made up of many things.
We didn’t open until 2014 because renovating the premises turned out to be much more complicated than expected. As in Austria, we faced bureaucratic obstacles, as well as technical challenges. For example, machines that were delivered didn’t fit the Chinese connections, and our Chocolate Theatre was a complex building to begin with.
At first, we sometimes couldn’t get our products through customs, and delivery times were completely unpredictable. Today, of course, we know how goods need to be declared and new varieties labelled. Back then, we made mistakes in many areas and learned some expensive lessons.
Fortunately, we had good partners, especially my Chinese business partner Amy. I built everything together with her, and she still runs Zotter China today.
We also had to learn that chocolate didn’t have the same kind of tradition in China. Many people didn’t really know what to expect from us. So the initial rush of visitors was rather modest.
We developed partnerships with international schools and initially attracted many Europeans and other international visitors. Visitor numbers gradually increased.
There was also a lot for us to learn culturally. Many Chinese visitors, for example, were hesitant to take samples themselves. For us, it was obvious that this was exactly what we wanted them to do. But we had to communicate that first.
Finding staff was also difficult in the beginning. As an Austrian company, we have a different corporate culture, and we had to train our employees from scratch to work with chocolate.
Today, we have a very committed team and well-established processes. The Chocolate Theatre looks different now from what I originally imagined. It’s more mature, easier for our Chinese customers to understand and combines our culture more closely with Chinese culture.
“I Had to Learn That It Could Work Without Me”
What responsibilities did you personally have in establishing Zotter Shanghai?
I built Zotter Shanghai together with Amy. That was our great fortune.
Overall, I’d describe my time there as bittersweet. Not everything was as easy as we’d imagined, but the market and the people are incredibly fascinating.
From 2017 onwards, I was mainly based in Austria again, and my business partner took over as Managing Director in Shanghai. Even so, I was still needed. Every six to eight weeks, I travelled to Shanghai for about two weeks. We were constantly in touch, and major decisions were discussed during my visits.
Looking back, though, I also have to admit that I found it very difficult to let go. I still wanted to be involved in every process, even though I was no longer permanently on site. I struggled to allow my colleagues to make their own mistakes.
It’s easy to start believing you’re infallible and that you can do certain things better than anyone else. I found that exhausting. I felt torn between the two locations. It wasn’t a pleasant situation.
Then came COVID. What did the pandemic mean for Zotter Shanghai and your own role there?
Yes. And the travel restrictions finally severed that connection.
Suddenly, almost everything we’d built in Shanghai became irrelevant during the pandemic, because our concept depended so heavily on visitors. We had to consider how we could generate any income at all beyond the online shop. Our plants, our machinery, so much of it simply stood still.
I had to return to Europe and leave Shanghai behind. In retrospect, that also saved me.
My team had to learn to manage without me. And I had to learn that things could work without me.
I look back on it with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they didn’t need me nearly as much as I might have thought. On the other, I’m incredibly proud of how Zotter Shanghai has developed.
That experience still shapes me today. I’ve learned to let go a little more easily now.
Of course, I still travel to Shanghai to visit my colleagues, but much more calmly and not nearly as often. My business partner now runs the company there like a family business. I couldn’t have wished for anything better.
COVID was an extremely difficult time for us in China, and it took a long time to recover. Even so, I wouldn’t really want to miss any of that experience. It made us what we are today.
Nicaragua, Pará and the Rhythm of Cocoa
Was there an encounter in a cocoa-producing country that permanently changed the way you see the product?
In 2004, we visited a cocoa plantation in Nicaragua for the first time. We wanted to understand how the cocoa farmers behind the chocolate were doing.
Even then, we realised that direct contact also strengthens your understanding of quality. It’s about exchange and meeting people as equals. Good chocolate can only be made when the quality of the cocoa beans is equally high.
As a result, we decided to build a bean-to-bar factory and make a truly major investment so that we could carry out every production step ourselves. That gave us control over which ingredients went into our chocolate. It was equally clear to us that they had to be organic and fair trade.
That was also the moment when my brother and I realised that we thought this company was pretty cool and wanted to be part of it. That enthusiasm is still with us today.
I had another formative experience a few years later. At 22, I spent three months in Pará, in the Amazon rainforest of northern Brazil, living and working with cocoa farmers. I stayed with two families.
During that time, I not only learned to speak Portuguese fluently but, more importantly, developed a much better understanding of the rhythm of cocoa production. From tending the plants to harvesting and conducting my own fermentation experiments, I was able to try everything myself.
My host families welcomed me as one of their own. That allowed me to truly immerse myself in the culture and gain a completely new appreciation of cocoa and its importance in the farmers’ everyday lives.
What Visitors Should Take Away from the Zotter Chocolate Theatre
When visitors leave the Chocolate Theatre, what do you hope they’ll take away besides chocolate?
We hope our customers understand our philosophy and recognise why organic production and fair trade are so important to us. We do care about the people behind our products.
We want visitors to see that acting sustainably can be both worthwhile and appealing, and perhaps take away an idea for making their own lifestyle a little more sustainable. Every change counts.
We don’t want to lecture people. Instead, we want to show what each individual can contribute towards making our world a little more sustainable.
And, of course, we hope our visitors thoroughly enjoy their time in the Zotter experience, taste plenty of chocolate and come back soon with friends and family.
This interview was originally conducted in German and translated into English.
