More Flavours Don't Mean More Profits: What We've Learned About Range Size

When we started, the instinct was to add.

More flavours. More formats. More options for more customers. The logic seemed sound: a wider range means more people find something they want, which means more sales, which means more revenue. A customer who doesn't like dark chocolate might like milk chocolate. A customer who doesn't want a bar might want a truffle. More is more.

We have learned, sometimes expensively, that this is wrong. Not always wrong — range expansion is sometimes the right decision. But the instinct to add, unchecked, is one of the most reliable ways to make a small food business less profitable rather than more.

Here is what a larger range actually costs, and what we've learned about the right size for ours.

The Hidden Costs of Every New Flavour

When you add a new flavour to a handmade chocolate range, the visible cost is the recipe development — the ingredients, the batches, the time. This is real, but it is the smallest part of the cost.

The larger costs are invisible until they accumulate.

Ingredient complexity. Every new flavour typically requires at least one new ingredient. That ingredient needs to be sourced, stocked, and managed. It has its own shelf life, its own storage requirements, its own supplier relationship. A range of thirty flavours might require forty or fifty distinct ingredients. Each one is a small administrative burden. Together, they are a significant one.

Minimum order quantities. Specialty ingredients — freeze-dried fruit, specific spice blends, particular nut varieties — often have minimum order quantities that exceed what a small producer needs for a single batch. You buy more than you need, store it, and hope you use it before it expires. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't.

Production complexity. A kitchen making five products can run efficiently. A kitchen making twenty-five products is constantly switching between recipes, cleaning equipment between batches, managing the interactions between different ingredients and different temperatures. The switching cost — the time and attention lost in transitions — is real and it compounds.

Inventory risk. Every product in your range is inventory that can expire, bloom, or deteriorate. A range of thirty products means thirty potential sources of waste. A range of ten products means ten. The smaller range is not just simpler — it is less exposed.

Attention dilution. This is the cost that is hardest to quantify and most important to understand. Every product in your range competes for your attention — for the time you spend making it, tasting it, improving it, talking about it. A range that is too wide means that no single product gets the attention it deserves. The products that could be exceptional become merely good, because the attention required to make them exceptional is spread too thin.

The Revenue Side Is Not What You Expect

The assumption behind range expansion is that more products mean more revenue. In practice, the relationship is more complicated.

Most customers, most of the time, buy from a small subset of your range. The products that drive the majority of your revenue are usually three to five items — the bestsellers, the ones that get reordered, the ones that people recommend to friends. The rest of the range exists for variety, for discovery, for the customer who wants something specific. But it does not drive proportionate revenue.

This means that a range of thirty products is often generating most of its revenue from five or six of them, while the other twenty-four are consuming ingredients, production time, and attention without contributing proportionately to the bottom line.

We have products in our range that we love and that sell steadily but not spectacularly. We keep them because they are genuinely good and because they serve customers who want them. But we are honest with ourselves about which products are carrying the business and which ones are passengers.

The Paradox of Choice Problem

There is a well-documented phenomenon in consumer psychology called the paradox of choice: beyond a certain point, more options make it harder to decide, not easier. A customer faced with thirty chocolate options is more likely to feel overwhelmed and buy nothing than a customer faced with ten options and a clear recommendation.

We have seen this at expos. A table with every product we make, arranged in equal prominence, produces a particular kind of paralysis in customers. They look at everything, pick up several things, put them down, and eventually ask: "What do you recommend?" The recommendation — a single product, chosen for them — is what they needed from the beginning. The thirty options were noise.

A curated range, presented with confidence, converts better than a comprehensive range presented without hierarchy. This is counterintuitive but consistent. Fewer options, clearly recommended, produce more decisions than more options presented equally.

What We've Done About It

We have not dramatically reduced our range — we have a genuine variety of products and we believe in offering real choice. But we have become more deliberate about what we add and more willing to retire products that are not earning their place.

Before adding a new flavour, we now ask: does this product serve a customer need that is not already served by something in our range? Does it use ingredients we already stock, or does it add new complexity? Can we make it to the standard of our best products, or will it be a distraction from them? And critically: what would we remove to make room for it?

That last question is the most important one. A range that only ever grows is a range that is never edited. Editing — the willingness to retire a product that isn't earning its place, even if it is good — is one of the most important decisions a small food brand makes. It is also one of the hardest, because retiring a product feels like failure even when it is the right strategic decision.

The products that remain in our range after this process are the ones we are most proud of — the Ganache de Luxe, the Guava Chilli Truffles, the Masala Chai Dark Chocolate, the Cashew Matcha Dragées. Each one is there because it deserves to be, not because we haven't got around to removing it.

The Right Size Is Not a Number

There is no universal answer to how many products a chocolate brand should have. The right size depends on the production capacity, the ingredient sourcing capability, the customer base, and the ambition of the brand.

What we can say is that the right size is almost always smaller than the instinct suggests. The instinct is to add. The discipline is to edit. And the brands that edit well — that have the confidence to offer fewer things done better — are almost always more profitable, more focused, and more respected than the ones that offer everything.

More flavours is not more profits. Better flavours, made with full attention, sold to customers who understand what they're buying — that is more profits. The range is the means. The attention is the point.

Explore the range we've edited down to what we're most proud of: Cavasa Chocolates — made in Ambur, Tamil Nadu, with full attention. 🍫