Here's why they line up for this gelato in Aurora

Clayton Dixon happily spends the heat of summer scooping out cups of his own gelato as he considers his good fortune running his successful Chocolate & Co shop.

Among the favourites are his wild blueberry and lavender, spun from berries sourced from Quebec and an especially aromatic variety of lavender culled from his neighbour’s garden.

“The colour is gorgeous,” he explains.

Dixon’s dream began with chocolate – the premium varieties carefully handmade using premium ingredients he discovered while travelling through Europe when he was in his 20s. Once you try excellent chocolate, he explains, there’s no turning back.

It was something he often thought about as he pursued a career in finance. As time went on, instead of dissipating, his dream grew.

Back in Toronto, he could find nothing that quite matched what he experienced abroad. The chocolate shop model of the 1970s and 1980s was not sustainable, he discovered, because they relied heavily upon holidays such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day for much of their business. Fine chocolate became hard to find.

The idea of creating a business grew, but he realized a business couldn’t rely on chocolate alone – a new model was combining it with another business, such as coffee or ice cream. Dixon decided gelato would be a great summer accompaniment to his chocolate.

“I got to the point where I just couldn’t let go of this silly little business idea, my take, my interpretation on truffles,” he recalls. “It’s kind of a mid-life crisis story. I wanted to start it before I was 50.”

So at age 48, after more than 20 years in finance, he created something of a commercial kitchen in his basement. He started researching the chocolate-making process and then began experimenting, finding and using different ingredients and recipes, whipping up his early creations at home, advancing to creating his own interpretations.

Then he found a nice spot, small but central on Yonge Street, just south of Aurora’s traditional core. And he opened up Chocolate & Co in November 2020 during the height of the pandemic.

It turned out that COVID-19 wasn’t a huge impediment on his largely take-out business with the intense focus on supporting small business. People were able to walk in and out one at a time and easily distanced themselves.

His shop carries a permanent selection of 24 flavours of chocolate – half milk and half dark – including raspberry and hazelnut truffle and milk and honey, where he replaces the sugar with honey, adding a creamed-honey trough inside.

Because blueberry lavender became such a popular gelato flavour, Dixon decided to create a blueberry lavender chocolate, as well.

“Although I sell gelato 12 months of the year and I sell chocolate 12 months of the year, we kind of turn into a gelato shop in the summer time and a more of a chocolate shop in the non-summer months,” says Dixon. “Sometimes we can sell out faster than we can make it, but it’s a great problem to have.”

Often on a warm summer evening, people line up outside the shop for gelato – which has become an after-dinner treat in Aurora.

About half the 750 square feet is used for production, a section is reserved for raw material and about a quarter is occupied by a retail counter, half for chocolate, half for gelato.

While Dixon makes more than 50 gelato flavours, there’s only room in the display for 10, so he rotates them regularly with only the perennially favourite chocolate finding a permanent space up front. Half the gelato flavours are milk-based, while the other half is water-based with just about every fruit available in both options. There are also nuts, such as pistachios, and even basil straight from the garden and parmesan. And there can be a mix of flavours as well.

“We always try to focus on ingredients, that’s pretty much always front and centre. I bend over backwards to source what I think is the best ingredient and treat it with the most respect and give people what I think is the best interpretation of that,” he says.

There’s a small bar at the front window where up to four people can sit looking out onto the street. There’s also seating outdoors.

The windows, designed by his daughter who is studying art, always have fun, whimsical designs that are changed monthly, often a thrill to the younger customers.

“When I opened, I had a very small gelato machine and display case just to get me going… the response was fantastic and I knew I had to upgrade my equipment by the next summer,” he said. ”I just ordered a bunch of equipment from Italy and haven’t looked back.”

In September, he’ll start training someone who will be working full time in production.

Nearly four years in, Dixon sometimes considers a larger space. But then again, he muses, maybe he’ll just create another shop or two in the area.