If you were to imagine the leader of Australia’s oldest chocolate factory, the archetype of Willy Wonka (flamboyant, whimsical, mad genius) is difficult to resist. Peter Millard, a supply chain officer by trade (bespectacled, bookish, a little awkward) doesn’t pretend to be anything of the sort.

“I’m a mathematician. I sit there and think about squares,” said Millard, the newly installed chief executive of Haigh’s Chocolates.

But it’s not cocoa truffles he’s referring to: building a business, he explains, is like building out an ever-expanding cube.

“You’re not just growing in one dimension or another, you’re growing in three, four, five, six dimensions,” Millard said. “Complexity is the big thing.”

As Haigh's grows its national footprint to 22 with the opening of its newest store in S

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