Caretakers of a Jackson Legacy

“Gilbert Chocolates began in 1893 in Findlay, Ohio. John and his wife, Mary, operated there until 1900 when they decided they needed to move to the city, so they packed everything up and moved up here to Jackson. They bought a building, then built a new one in 1903 on Main Street, which is now Michigan Avenue. That building still exists. Now, it’s the building that houses both the Jackson Chamber of Commerce and Experience Jackson. The dumbwaiter used to transport the chocolates from the factory to the restaurant is still there, and you can still see burn marks on the floor from the machinery that was used to make the chocolate. Eventually they built three factories in Jackson, Los Angeles and Scranton, with about 250 employees making chocolates.

When John Gilbert died, Helga Austin bought the business, downsized, and moved the whole thing to Ackerson Lake Drive and into a building that was about 1000 square feet. They called it Chocolate Cottage and did wholesale, supplying people with Gilbert chocolates. It wasn’t until 1990 that they reopened a candy store here in Jackson. That was only there for a few years. They shut that down and opened the store in what’s now the Jackson Crossing Mall. They opened the store there in 1991.

Then in 2013, Brian was consulting with Bill Blakemore, who owned Gilbert Chocolates at the time. He had made suggestions to Bill for how to improve the factory, to get better prices, and things like that. Anyway, Bill brought up that he decided he was ready to sell the business…and Brian decided he wanted to buy it. I’d never heard of Gilbert Chocolates, but one day he came home and said, ‘Here, have a chocolate bar.’

And it was the best chocolate I’d ever had.

That convinced us and we bought Gilbert Chocolates in 2013 and moved into this location in 2016.