Sweet spot

BY PAT PATERA

When Tammy Borde attends a trade show, she hands out body parts. Not hands and feet just the juicy bits, modeled from chocolate.

As owner of the Chocolate Walrus, an erotic shop on South Virginia Street, Borde takes shapely young models on the road to promote the store's best seller: exotic and erotic homemade candy.

"People pay us to travel to their locations," she says.

They travel to Good Vibrations in San Francisco, for its annual Valentine's Day Sweethearts Ball and to erotica and candy shows in Los Angeles. Locally, at Fantasies in Chocolate, Chocolate Walrus won the award for "most unique" confection.

Nationally, customers include adult chain stores such as Priscilla and Adam and Eve. Chocolate Walrus' customers even include shops in Paris.

The candies retail in the $1.50 to $12 range.

"Male anatomy is the best seller," says Borde. "People buy them when going to visit hospital patients. They say, 'We want something to make the patient laugh.'"

Also big is bachelorette party season.

But bachelor parties are not keen on the confections. "Chocolate is a girl thing," Borde says. And those gals keep themselves top-of-mind with their guys by packing candy female parts as lunch box stuffers.

"And construction companies buy them for birthday jokes and have a good laugh," she says.

Chocolate Walrus was started in 1985, and Borde bought the business in 2004.

"I went into buy a gift basket and bought the company," she laughs.

But the 3,600-square-foot store with the candy kitchen downstairs proved too small." We couldn't keep up with the orders," Borde says.

"There wasn't enough room for shipping."

So she leased an additional 1,400 square feet next door and built a

chocolate kitchen. The company employs two candy makers in summer, and seven during high season, from September through May. Summer is an expensive time to deliver product because cold shipment adds 25 percent more in shipping costs.

Creative food presentation is nothing new to Borde, who grew up around the family catering company that operated for 30 years in Los Angeles.

"We did lots of Hollywood parties," she recalls. "We're a big family. We love food."

When her mother, Louise Coffin, retired from the catering business, Borde brought her in as confectioner at Chocolate Walrus.