The Kilwins Chocolate Kitchen retail store in Petoskey, MI is open and we are excited about serving you. Our Chocolate Kitchen is operating and although tours are temporarily suspended you can still stop in and watch us make our Kilwins Heritage Chocolate and delicious TUTTLE™ Nut Caramels, Truffles & Chocolates, Caramel Apples, Caramel Corn, Brittle, and other confections right before your eyes!
Kilwins is made up of over 150 franchisee store owners with stores in 25 states, and our team here at our Petoskey Kitchen. Our goal is to provide you with the best Chocolates, made-in-store Confections and “Original Recipe” Ice Cream, as well as a great experience every time you visit your local Kilwins store.
When they opened for business in 1947, Don and Katy Kilwins' desire was simple – to make the very best products that they possibly could. Today, we continue this American success story with Kilwins tradition of producing the highest quality Chocolates, Original Recipe Ice Creams and other confections, combined with people who care and strive to provide you with a premium experience.
Kilwins combines the best of our heritage of quality products with modern business practices which are shared with and supported by our family of owner operators.
Kilwins has traditionally appealed to all the senses with our fresh hand-made Chocolates and other products made here in our kitchen. To make sure customers get the best products and experience we also make many products fresh in each store.
Not only does Kilwins make great Chocolates and other confections, but we make the very best Original Recipe Ice Cream, too. Using our candy making know-how, we started making Original Recipe Ice Cream in 1985 in each store and developed our own original recipes, which we still use today. Because of the volume of ice cream that our customers enjoy each year, today our Original Recipe Ice Cream is made for us still using our exact original recipes.
In our high temperature cooking area we use whatever equipment we think makes the best candy so you will see some of our heritage equipment as well as some newer equipment.
Kilwins controls all stages of making and delivering products. In order to ensure that our stores and you get the highest quality products possible, Kilwins has invested in special storage facilities and trucks that closely control temperature and humidity.
We continually strive to make the best Chocolates and confections. We use our original recipes and continue to develop and innovate new recipes and ideas over time.
Almost all products made in our cold room, like our Almond Toffee Crunch, have been made the same way by Kilwins for decades – hand-made. There are easier, quicker, and less expensive ways to make it, but we still hand-make these products because the quality is better.
We have been expertly molding and enrobing (coating) Chocolates with the same equipment and processes since 1965. Over the years we’ve made some improvements and have added new chocolate milling equipment that allows us to create new and unique blends of chocolate.
A lot of effort and time goes into producing chocolate from cocoa beans - a long and complicated process which begins with expertly growing cocoa trees and ends with us expertly enrobing or molding high quality chocolate.
Our entire Kilwins team is proud of our hand-crafted heritage. We love our products and have fun making them for you! At the end of the enrobing line we give our products one last look before they are packaged, labeled and sent to our stores for you to enjoy.