Edible photographs drive sales for Tahoe company

Take a warm, fuzzy idea - cute photos of kids - and the universally beloved taste of chocolate, meld them together and you have a product worthy of Yahoo!.

Business is sweet at the Lake Tahoe Chocolate Factory and its partner, Picture This, says Lynn Falcone, co-owner and the merged companies' sales manager.

The Tahoe-based company reached a new level this year when the Republican Party chose its chocolate chip cookies as a national convention giveaway.

It bought 8,000 cookies festooned with slogans, elephants and flags, says Falcone.

That was a big sale for the young enterprise.

But even bigger is a recent sale to Yahoo! - set to go public this week.

The mega-Web site chose one of Falcone's edible images as a product announcement giveaway.

Falcone brought the idea of edible photos to Tahoe and merged with the Lake Tahoe Chocolate Factory, then owned by chocolatier Patrick Atherton, about four years ago.

Falcone and Atherton are now partners.

The imaging was a new process she'd seen a few years before, and which she had been perfecting to make it usable for candy, cookies and Kellogg's Rice Krispies Treats.

In fact,most of the photos seen on caketops, she says, are still made of edible paper.

Her product is not.

It's an edible image imposed directly on food.

Falcone, an early innovator of the process, says that many companies can now create edible cookies like she does.

But most have not yet figured out how to impose the images on chocolate and Rice Krispie Treats.

Interesting thing about the competition, though.

In general, it helps her business.

The more people know about the photo possibilities of food, she says, the more customers she sees coming her way.

Business spins off to local suppliers, too, with the chocolate coming from her Lake Tahoe Chocolate Factory partner and the cookies chiefly from Carson City-based Madeleine's Cookies, though the Rice Krispies Treats come from Kellogg's.

Business is doubling annually, adds Falcone, and despite her recent big orders from the Republicans and Yahoo!, most of her customers are local.

During the holidays, Falcone spent a day hawking her cookies at the Reno airport's Ponderosa Pines gift store.

She sells them in some casino shops, as well as at the Lake Tahoe Chocolate Factory shop, and is looking into further retail.

But retail is not a business goal for Picture This, she says.

She goes after the big customers hotels and casinos.

They send in orders for large parties and groups.Weddings, bar mitzvahs, and family celebrations, too, are big customers.

Her company's edibleimaging.com Internet site brings orders in, too.

The challenge, she says, is more than just building the business.

It is in controlling the growth and maintaining quality while expanding a sweet challenge that she is not complaining about.