GIVE ME CHOCOLATE ice cream, chocolate cake, chocolate cookies any day. But I’ve never been partial to boxed chocolates, something that never ceases to surprise my family each holiday gathering when box after box circles the room after dinner. “Not having any? Well, then, I’ll have yours,” goes the usual refrain of an uncle or cousin licking maraschino juice off his fingers.

But when I had the opportunity to visit New Brunswick’s annual Chocolate Fest in early August and plow my way through peanut butter, vanilla and caramel centres, I thought, “Boys, eat your heart out.”

Tucked into the southwest corner of the province, St. Stephen sits on the U.S. border, a half-hour drive to the Bay of Fundy. It is the historic home of Ganong, a 135-yearold chocolatier and purveyor of boxed treats. The week-long Chocolate Fest kicks off just a few klicks away in tony St. Andrews, at the grand Fairmont Algonquin, with a chocolate- themed brunch.

In the hotel lobby, I meet Lynn Kelley, the queen of cream centres and coordinator of the 23rd annual Chocolate Fest, dolled up like a perfect petit four. In the stately dining room, we breeze past a buffet of salads and waffles and eggs-any-way and head for the dessert table, which might more accurately be described as a dessert room, with a two-metre-tall chocolate lighthouse looming over us as we pile our plates.

As I munch on a crumbly devil’s food cupcake with slick and swirly chocolate frosting, Kelley tells me how she lucked into her job just two months ago. “I was told I was going to sell a few tickets, send some e-mails,” she says, between bites of almond-chocolate cheesecake, guffawing as she describes how she soon learned she was in charge of running the show, which draws about 6,000 people annually to St. Stephen. Canada’s Chocolate Town, as locals have dubbed it, is a former mill town of 3,500 on the banks of the St. Croix River, the border separating New Brunswick and Maine and also the Central and Atlantic time zones. It is the eighth busiest border crossing between Canada and the United States and its narrow main street carries about 900 transport trucks a day and 8,000 tourist vehicles in the high season past the 1920s-era Ganong factory, which now houses a museum and chocolate shop.

When brothers James and Gilbert Ganong opened the grocery store that would one day become their chocolate empire, St. Stephen was the hub of New Brunswick, with 50 wharves and a larger population than Saint John. The brothers created the famed Valentine’s Day chocolate box, albeit by accident. They rolled out a heart-shaped box for Christmas 1932, which turned out to be a soft seller until they reintroduced it two months later. According to company lore, Ganong also developed the world’s first packaged chocolate bar in 1910. But perhaps Ganong’s greatest claim to fame is that it has remained family-owned and has held off the forces of globalization to stay rooted in New Brunswick.