The Retail Move
Cacao Market by MarieBelle New York is placing its Dark Chocolate Truffles in select Costco warehouses across Brooklyn, Long Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey for the holiday gifting window, marking a meaningful step into the mass-club channel for the artisan chocolate brand. The 50-piece box, priced at $21.99, is also available nationwide on Costco.com and through Instacart, while a three-box bundle retails for $84.00 online.
The Costco placement accompanies an active Roadshow sampling program running weekly at participating warehouse locations — a proven in-store trial mechanic that club-channel brands increasingly rely on to convert first-time buyers at scale. For a brand with boutique roots in New York City's SoHo neighborhood, the warehouse club environment represents a significant broadening of distribution reach and a different consumer acquisition funnel than direct-to-consumer or specialty retail.
Brand Architecture Context
Cacao Market is the accessible, everyday sub-brand of MarieBelle New York, the luxury chocolatier founded by Maribel Lieberman, CEO and Founder, who launched her SoHo flagship in 2001. The sub-brand is designed to extend MarieBelle's handcraft positioning — truffles are finished with a delicate cocoa coating and feature a velvety ganache center — into a price tier that suits gifting, sharing, and impulse purchase occasions rather than the premium boutique transaction. Packaging draws on the geometric artwork of Jacques Lieberman, maintaining brand visual equity across the trade-down tier.
"Bringing our Dark Chocolate Truffles to Costco allows us to introduce more people to high-quality chocolate at a price that makes them perfect for indulging, sharing, or gifting," Lieberman said.
Holiday Shelf Stakes
For foodservice and retail confectionery buyers, the MarieBelle-Costco pairing illustrates a broader trend: fine-chocolate brands using club-channel holiday placements as a volume accelerator without repositioning their flagship assortment. The $21.99 price point for 50 pieces lands at roughly $0.44 per truffle — accessible enough to compete with mass gifting sets while preserving an artisan narrative that commodity candy SKUs cannot replicate.
The premium chocolate segment has outpaced the broader confectionery category in recent seasons, driven by consumers trading up on ingredients while trading down on occasion formality — a dynamic that makes Costco's holiday gifting floor increasingly contested territory. Brands from Compartés to Vosges have tested club and off-premise retail expansion strategies as a complement to DTC channels, and MarieBelle's move fits that playbook squarely.
For operators tracking ingredient and gifting trends in the specialty food and beverage space, the Costco rollout signals that artisan chocolate is finding durable shelf space beyond the specialty grocery aisle — with volume pricing, in-store sampling, and e-commerce bundling doing the distribution heavy lifting.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
