Personalised corporate chocolate: how to order it

Three levels of personalisation exist, and they do not call for the same lead time or the same budget: the card slipped into the box, the sleeve or ribbon in your company colours, then the logo printed on the packaging. The first is usually free. The third always goes through a quote.

Three levels, and only one is free

The card first. A piece of board slipped into the box, your message on it, sometimes your logo. Neuhaus includes it on every order placed online, Leonidas Délices offers it with a logo on request. No extra lead time, no minimum, no surcharge. It is the level most companies are after without knowing it, and the one they are sold least willingly.

The sleeve and ribbon next. A cardboard band that wraps the box, or a printed bolduc ribbon in the company colours. At Neuhaus, this level leaves the online shop and moves into the business department. At Leonidas Délices, the ribbon and bespoke wrapping are reserved for ballotins, which rules out the metal boxes and cubes in the catalogue straight away.

The printed logo last, on the packaging itself. Pierre Marcolini puts an in-house designer on it and keeps a personalisation catalogue separate from the end-of-year one. Tony's Chocolonely lets you compose the entire wrapper of a 180 gram bar, with a technical caveat worth reading before you sign off artwork: the back carries the nutritional values and the ingredient list, and one short side stays free for the batch code and the expiry date. You get the front face, and nothing else.

A fourth level exists, the box designed entirely for you. It is not ordered. It is negotiated, and Bruyerre files it explicitly under its private label offer, starting from a written brief.

Which house accepts which level of personalisation?

I read the five business pages on 10 September 2026 and set down what they state in black and white. Anything they leave out appears as not published, never as an estimate of mine.

Two rows deserve a comment. Tony's is the only one that lets a buyer design their packaging without talking to anybody, and the only one whose unit price shows without a quote: €7.28 including VAT for a personalised 180 gram bar, template rate recorded on 10 September. On the morning of my survey the wrapper creator was in fact showing a maintenance screen, which is a risk worth factoring in when you are ordering three days before an awards evening.

Bruyerre, at the other end of the table, publishes nothing at all. The house has been producing in Gosselies since 1909, turns out more than sixty pralines and works from written briefs. You will not see a figure before you pick up the phone.

What is the minimum order quantity?

None of the five states one.

Their business pages advertise discounts "depending on the quantities ordered" without saying where those start. The silence is consistent: the minimum depends on the medium, not on the house. A card can be done as a one-off. A printed sleeve needs a plate, therefore a print run, therefore a floor set by the packaging supplier.

Ask for it in your first email, before you request the catalogue.

How do you place the order in six steps?

1. Set the budget per head before you open a single catalogue. A total figure says nothing: €3,000 across twenty clients and €3,000 across three hundred staff do not open the same doors.
2. Count the delivery addresses, separately from the number of gifts. Those two figures drive the real cost far more than the price printed on the box.
3. Pick your level of personalisation from the four above, then stick to it. Moving up a level mid-project pushes the delivery date back, never forward.
4. Ask for three figures in your first message: minimum quantity, production lead time once the artwork is approved, and shipping cost per address. A quote that answers only two of them is incomplete.
5. Send artwork in CMYK, with generous margins around the logo. The preview on your screen is in RGB and will come out slightly different from the file you supplied.
6. Lock a handover date, not an order date, and work the calendar backwards from it. Allow four to six weeks for a personalised end-of-year gift.

What does shipping to 150 addresses cost?

Far more than the "free delivery" line suggests, and it is the item quotes forget.

At Neuhaus, Belgian delivery is free from €60 and charged at €6 below that. The threshold applies per destination address, and the shop states it explicitly for multiple shipments. Take the 350 gram Timeless Masterpieces ballotin, recorded at €36.75 on 10 September 2026, and send one to the home of a hundred and fifty employees: every parcel stays under the threshold, so every parcel costs €6. Nine hundred euros of shipping, sixteen per cent added to the price of the gift, for a line that appears nowhere in the catalogue.

The same order delivered once to the office clears the threshold in a single go and costs nothing.

The number of addresses weighs more on the invoice than the choice of house.

Leonidas Délices gives free Belgian delivery from €50 and handles multiple shipments differently: a bpost file to fill in and email back, one for Belgium, one for international. The mechanism is more flexible, the arithmetic is identical. A Mix Pralines ballotin at €12.54 apiece will never clear a €50 threshold on its own.

Add a Belgian constraint none of these pages mentions. VAT on a business gift is only recoverable if the gift is worth less than €50 excluding VAT per recipient per year, while the expense stays 50 % deductible up to €250. At the 6 % rate that applies to foodstuffs, the €60 free-shipping threshold at Neuhaus works out at €56.60 excluding VAT, and Marcolini's €59 at €55.66. A gift priced to earn free delivery therefore lands just above the amount that costs you the VAT deduction.

What budget per head for how many recipients?

Twenty strategic clients at €60 to €90 apiece: Pierre Marcolini. Its business gift catalogue is explicitly built above €50 per unit, an account manager follows the file, and personalisation runs from a sticker to a bespoke box. The house is also the only one of the five to select, roast and conche its own beans when almost every luxury chocolatier buys its couverture. Across twenty recipients, that argument gets told. It holds for ten seconds in a meeting, which is exactly what an eighty euro gift is for.

A hundred and fifty employees at €15 to €30 apiece: Neuhaus or Leonidas Délices. The ballotin stays under the €50 excluding VAT bar, so the VAT stays deductible, and the personalised card costs nothing at either house.

Eight hundred recipients at €5 to €10 apiece: Leonidas or Bruyerre, and Marcolini drops out. A business catalogue that starts above €50 has nothing to offer at eight euros a head, and forcing the house down to that scale would produce meagre portions that serve nobody. Bruyerre, which has produced in bulk and under private label for a century in Gosselies, is built for exactly that volume.

Seven mistakes that cost money in December

None of the five houses publishes a cut-off date for holiday orders. All of them fall back on the quote, which moves the risk onto the buyer.

• Confusing the total budget with the budget per head, and finding out the difference at sign-off.
• Sending a hundred and fifty parcels to individual homes without working out the shipping per address.
• Approving artwork in RGB, then wondering why the printed green is not the brand green.
• Choosing a very dark background, more sensitive to transport scuffing, which arrives streaked with white.
• Crossing the €50 excluding VAT line unknowingly and losing the deduction on the whole order.
• Forgetting that the sleeve at Leonidas Délices covers ballotins only, not the metal boxes.
• Waiting until November, when the personalisation slots are already taken by whoever called in October.

One last point about shelf life, because it changes the calendar. Tony's guarantees a minimum of three months from the order date, often six months to a year. A ballotin of fresh pralines will not last three weeks. If your gifts have to go out in several waves into January, the bar is not a fallback, it is the right call.

For the substance rather than the mechanics, which house to give as a corporate gift covers register and recipient. The ballotin explains why the same box turns up at every Belgian house, and the most prestigious gift boxes in the world set the scale above these budgets. Our ranking keeps the order of preference between houses.