WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Despite the rise of cocoa and candy prices, people are excited to celebrate this Easter weekend with lots of sweet treats. 

A local staple, Chocolate Storybook in West Des Moines, has been busy with customers filing in and out all week long. 

“We have been in Easter mode since the day after Valentine’s Day. It’s awesome. Easter is our second biggest holiday behind Christmas. We’re just ready to go. We’re a family business so when we’re really busy, it’s great. We’re all hands-on deck. It’s kind of like our Super Bowl,” Kelly Dettmer from Chocolate Storybook said.

Their most popular item by far is the personalized chocolate egg. 

“A lot of the times what people say is that it’s not Easter without a Chocolate Storybook Easter egg, which makes me so happy,” she said. “Also, people have said that about our apples as well, is that it’s not like their Easter tradition unless they have an egg with their name on it.”

The shop is expected to sell over 3,000 personalized eggs and bunnies this holiday week. But they have much more to offer than just those.

“Oh, the possibilities are endless. We could do so much. We also have a ton of gummies and candies, jellybeans. We do chocolate covered peeps. We have all of our turtles that very popular as well. We do specialty caramel apples with little bunnies on them. We also do caramel cutouts and marshmallow cutouts that get decorated in the back by our candy kitchen. Sometimes people come in and they just pick random stuff out of the store and we will build a basket for you and shrink wrap it and give it to you for Easter.”

The shop goes back to 1986 and is continuing to thrive, especially this week, even with thoughts of potential tariffs in the back of their minds.

“Yes, absolutely. The tariffs have impacted our business, but we’re doing everything that we can to keep our prices low,” Dettmer said. “Specifically, the price of cocoa has gone up significantly, and that definitely impacted us. But we do everything that we can to prevent that from going to the customer. We make a lot of our stuff in-house, which is really great. So we’re not importing it from overseas. We are making it here.”

In fact, they started making their own “Dubai chocolate”, which has become very popular on social media. 

“We’ve literally been getting calls for months and months and months on it. So finally, we decided that we were going to make our own,” she said. “We just made our first batch this week. So it is completely brand new and we are obsessed. It is a different texture like you have never experienced before. People are coming in, asking about it on social media, which is really great.”

Chocolate Storybook is open Saturday before Easter but will be closed for the holiday on Sunday.

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