One chocolate lounge falls, another fights on in Hamilton

Monday, 23 June 2025

After nearly 15 years sweetening the lives of locals, Theobroma Chocolate Lounge at Chartwell has closed its doors - unable to weather the pressure of rising costs and a sharply declining market.

Co-owner Balaka Malhotra, who ran the business with her husband Ian Roberts-Thomson, said she fought to keep it going, but the odds were stacked too high.

“It’s very hard to be a business person at this time, especially a small business,” she told the Waikato Times. “I can’t live with that mental pain anymore.”

On March 17, an application to liquidate CACAO Limited, the company operating the Chartwell store, was filed in the High Court in Hamilton by the Inland Revenue Department.

It closed this month.

Malhotra confirmed the business owes a substantial amount to IRD, but says that’s the result of being financially cornered - hit from all sides by skyrocketing operational costs, high rent and a slow economy.

“I have been struggling to pay rent for the last two years,” she said.

“Fifty percent of my revenue was going to the rent, which is not sustainable at all.

“The mall charges you not only for the rent, but everything else like security, garbage disposal … it comes out to a substantial amount.”

She tried repeatedly to negotiate with the mall. “They just refused to give me any rebate or any slack, and they could see that I was paying 50% of my revenue to them.”

When Malhotra bought the Chartwell lounge in the early 2010s, business was booming. “Even after Covid, it picked up quite well,” she said. “But by mid-2023, it just started going down again … I was really struggling.”

She trimmed staff hours, stepped up her own workload to around 50 hours a week, and tried to keep things afloat with six part-time staffers working 20–25 hours a week.

“I had taken off all full-time staff because I did tell them, look, I can’t have you full time. I never told them that it will close probably, but I did tell them that look, I can’t sustain full time.”

Theobroma’s Centre Place café in the CBD, which the couple also owns, is still running - for now. “It is a similar issue with the Centre Place shop because our rents are the same,” she said. “But because this is winter time, and we are a winter cafe, it’s doing OK right now. I don’t know what will happen when summer hits.”

Still, some customers from Chartwell have found their way downtown. “I’ve been to the Centre Place a few times, and I see my customers there, which is good. They go there and support us.”

At one point there were seven Theobroma lounges around the country. Now, only three remain. Chocolate prices have spiked by 30% in two years, yet raising menu prices wasn’t easy, Malhotra added.

“We can’t really tell our customers,” she said. “And nobody wants to buy businesses like this, whose rent is so high, and is across from another café.”

She said the hospitality market is oversaturated in Hamilton. “Nobody should open a food business at the moment.”