BUFFALO, NEW YORK - If you’re from Buffalo, you know all about our great culinary heritage. If you’re from outside Buffalo, you might only think of the Anchor Bar’s Chicken Wings or perhaps the iconic “Beef on Weck.”

One local chocolatier though, is set to make the rest of the country also think of fine chocolate.

Enter Aléthea’s Chocolates (pronounced “ah-LEE-thee-ahhs”) new Custom Chocolate Box™, where website visitors can select from more than one hundred gourmet, premium-quality, hand-crafted truffles, creams, dipped nuts, fruits, jellies, crunches and caramels to create their very own custom 1-pound box of forty Aléthea’s chocolates.

If a visitor wants say … 20 milk chocolate caramels and 20 dark chocolate ginger slices. Or maybe they’re nuts for pecans, but soft on marshmallow. Maybe they’re keen to select one of each of their over 100 items (it’ll take 3 boxes to do it though, since only 40 fit in one box). No problem! Aléthea’s patent-pending Custom Chocolate Box™ lets them just click on what they want and order right from the website.

Moreover, Aléthea’s Chocolates is the only chocolatier online that offers the convenience of online shopping with the freshness and flexibility of actually coming to their Williamsville store or calling in an order. They’re calling it their ”All ooh … Zero eeuw!”(sm) option for holiday shopping.

(if only we could figure out a way to broadcast the intoxicating aroma over the Internet…)

Rare Earth Interactive, creator and developer of the Custom Chocolate Box™, used its unique combination of technology, entertainment and marketing skills to develop a solution that website visitors have characterized as “brilliantly designed,” “super-easy to use,” and “[making them want] to buy a ton of chocolate.” They accomplished this, while giving the non-techie website owner the ability to easily add, edit and remove available products through the already-familiar interface he’s used to manage the rest of the store’s website for the past three years.

Craig C. Chapman, Creative Director of Rare Earth Interactive remarked that “this technology is applicable to any business that has a customizable product.” He added, “it’s a simple matter to create a directory of accessories that can be combined in myriad different ways, then forward that request to a shopping cart or customer relationship management application. The capabilities are literally limitless.”

Aléthea’s Chocolates is in its third generation of family ownership, specializing in premium quality chocolates from their Williamsville, NY location.

Their website is located at http://www.aletheas.com/

Rare Earth Interactive Design, Inc., is a leading provider of innovative eBusiness solutions, online marketing and search engine optimization services. Rare Earth currently has over 85 customers in 17 states across the U.S.

Their website is located at http://www.rareearth.us/

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