With so many chocolate fountain suppliers and hundreds of websites offering you information, how do you choose the best supplier?

Good indicators in deciding whom to use as your chocolate fountain supplier are:

  • Can you easily get in contact with the supplier?
  • Are their points of contact professional?
  • Can they offer photos and references from other hires?
  • Are their prices reflective of the package offered?

Sometimes, we get enquiries where people will mention they are waiting to hear back from a few other companies before making a decision. If asked how long they have been waiting we are amazed to hear replies such as 1 week, 9 days, and once 15 days.

At Jack’s Chocolate Fountains we will reply to your forms within a maximum of 24hrs. More often than not we will reply to you within the hour. This will not be the case at weekends and at night due to this being the times we are hiring the fountains. If you have to wait more than 24hrs for a reply then this tells you three things. Firstly that the company isn’t used to getting lots of enquiries, meaning they will check their email less often. Secondly, that this is not the supplier’s full time job, suggesting that the experience of multiple hires is not there. Finally it should suggest that if the hirer is already having issues getting back to you before you have booked anything that maybe looking else where is a good idea.

A great indicator of a company’s quality of service is their website. This acts as the company’s first point of contact with their customers. 9 times out of 10, an efficient way of filtering out the really unprofessional suppliers, is their website. If you can’t navigate the site easily, come across it quickly via search engines, see up to date posts or blog entries, then it shows a lack of thought for what the website is there for. If such obvious issues have been over looked at your first introduction to the company, then when it comes to the smaller details of your hire and fountain hire how confident can you be that a good service is going to be offered.

We feel it is important when paying for a particular service, especially those that center around special occasions, you use someone who has the experience and past record that suggest they will do a brilliant job. Assuming your only point of contact with the chocolate fountain company is their website (which is nearly always the case), you should be able to access photos and references from previous hires, plus up to date blogs about the company and its happenings should be regularly up dated. Poor quality pictures or ones that are very tough to view are useless and blogs from Sept 2009 are a waste of time reading – for all you know the company could have stopped hiring. References and blogs should be updated at least once every month if not twice. Pictures should be clearly posted into the site and they should be ready to email to you if with any other info you request immediately.

A big factor in everyone’s decision on hiring luxuries is price. The price of a chocolate fountain hire depends on so many factors. You will find that most professional companies will not have their prices listed on their sites. This is because more details than, “knowing you want to hire a fountain”, are required to quote accurately for your event. Some of these factors are,

  • Guests numbers
  • Venue, as discounts for certain venues will apply if the company hire there regularly.
  • Timings you require the hire from and until
  • Date, as some months are priced differently than others (e.g Feb and Dec)

The old saying, “you get what you pay for”, is very true with a chocolate fountain hire. It is so important that you deal with professional and experienced companies. So many times we hear of companies who have failed to turn up or have take deposits and never got back in contact with the client.

With a chocolate fountain hire it is easy to re use chocolate and dips, buy poor quality fountains, not offer lighted surrounds etc. This will save money and allow the companies to offer a very low price.  As a result you receive a very poor services. So if it looks to good to be true it probably is. Make sure the quote you receive is reflective or at least within the regions of other quotes you have collected.

A few must haves are below:

  • 5 tiered fountain [A Giles and Posner or at a push a Shephra]
  • Lighted Surround
  • Staff (who man the fountain throughout your hire)
  • 3 hour running time as standard (you can have less if you need, but o offer should be a 3 hour period before you request lower)

Some quotes will be very high due to these companies not hiring as a full time job, and needing to make it worth their wild spending their weekends hiring at your event. As we mention in our site we guarantee to beat any like for like quotes. This wont be necessary as we will send you a quote that already lower than all other possible competitors. But just in case we let people know to tell us.

A chocolate fountain hire should be an exciting addition to your event. It shouldn’t be the cause of frustration and stress getting it there. Use the UK’s most popular chocolate fountain hire service, Jack’s, and this wont be the case. We look forward to seeing you later in the year and hope you found this blog help full.