World’s Finest Chocolate Fueling the Pursuit of Passion Through Fundraising

This is the first in an occasional series spotlighting companies, destinations or individuals that will be attending the TEAMS Conference & Expo for the first time. This year’s edition will take place from October 26—29 in Birmingham, Alabama, and will feature a Rookie Reception for first-time attendees. That event will be on Monday, October 26 at 4:00 p.m. CT at the Protective Stadium Club of the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex.

As a mother of four and an advertising professional, Amber Suba was plenty familiar with the need to fundraise for her children’s activities, and knew all the traditional approaches that never quite worked.

Grocery stores. Beg-a-thons. And car washes. Lots of car washes. “It’s parents getting really wet and getting a really bad car wash,” she said.

In 2014, Suba was a booster mom for one of her kids’ club soccer teams. She was approached about a product she’d never heard before — World’s Finest Chocolate. The team began selling that and raised three times more than any amount they’d raised previously, and did it four weeks faster.

Suba was an instant believer in the power of chocolate to raise money. One year later, she joined the company herself as director of sales and got an inside view at how World’s Finest Chocolate has built a devoted following not through selling in brick-and-mortar locations or finding their way into every vending machine from Alpharetta, Georgia, to Zanesville, Ohio, but instead through something much simpler: fundraising.

Sports Strategy

The company was founded in the chocolate haven of Chicago in 1939, but its roots as a fundraising force date to 1949. Company founder Edmond Opler was approached by the band at what was then known as Zion High School in Illinois, which wanted to sell the company’s chocolate bars to raise money. More than 75 years later, the company has now helped raise $4.6 billion.

Much of that has been devoted to programs through schools across the country, such as bands that need new instruments, or dance teams that need new outfits. Occasionally, that has meant forays into sports, such as with a girls’ kickball league in Texas which has raised more than $25,000 per year selling World’s Finest Chocolate, or Wilson Premier Youth Basketball in Wisconsin, which has raised $1.2 million for their teams and players since 2007. However, it was only in the past couple years that the company decided to dive headlong into the sports world, where it has done $3.5 million in fundraising.

“This is our fastest-growing and most interesting segment because sports is untapped for us,” said Suba, now a senior vice president at the company. “We’re designing a specific strategy to run hard at that.”

That strategy includes arming students with not just the candy itself, but with the rewards for selling effectively. Each box of candy bars typically costs the purchaser $40 — $1 for 40 bars. The bars are then sold at double that cost. The salesperson — usually a kid or their parent — keeps the profit.

Making Kids The Stars

As parents and coaches across the country look for ways to offset escalating prices for equipment, uniforms and travel, chocolate has become an effective — and delicious— way to reach those goals.

In the short time that World’s Finest Chocolate has made sports a priority, it has partnered with teams in baseball, basketball, football, gymnastics, wrestling . . . anything that has a barrier to entry that can be addressed by fundraising. Which is to say, all sports.

Inside World’s Finest Chocolate’s headquarters is a new team called the Playmakers, a subset of the fundraising sales team that comprises marketing and sales. The Playmakers identify opportunities to show organizations how the company can help them meet their financial goals. “They speak the language and understand things like traveling to Terre Haute, Indiana, for a fun Saturday,” said Suba. “These folks get it, they get the fact that a parent might have to call at 8 p.m. because they are a volunteer for a soccer club, and they need to raise money.”

The company then identifies Super Sellers, which doesn’t always mean the kids who sell the most chocolate. Instead, it could be the ones who do the most strategic, effective job at selling. Those kids are then interviewed and brought into the marketing campaigns for World’s Finest Chocolate.

“Showing youth performing in this way is the most powerful tool in our arsenal,” said Dave Ralph, director of independent sales and fundraising. “Selling chocolate is building life skills. When they go through the motions of raising funds you’re teaching valuable life skills, perseverance, persistence, marketing, especially when they know there’s a benefit on the other side. The ripple effect is they are doing this to do good things where there is teamwork and commitment and community.”

World’s Finest Chocolate sells a variety of different bars, from familiar favorites like Milk Chocolate to Continental Almonds. It bills itself as “chocolate, but not candy,” and boasts of its comparatively healthy ingredients. One ingredient common to the chocolate-bar world is missing from every offering of WFC: peanuts, so as to be mindful of the many children who are allergic.

Those kids grow up with fond memories not just of their time as salespeople, but of the product they sold to pursue their passions. More than once, Ralph says he has been wearing his company’s logo out in the world when someone will approach him and say, “I sold that as a kid. That’s the happiest experience I’ve ever had.”