Chocolate Pix was a pretty remarkable Utica success story that started with an unusual idea and ended up reaching people all across the country.

The company was started around 1986 by Utica inventor Robert Newsteder, who came up with a way to reproduce photographs and other images on chocolate.

That alone was pretty unusual for the time. Today we’re used to seeing personalized candy, cakes and all kinds of things made from photographs, but back in the 1980s this was something new. Chocolate Pix could take a photograph and turn it into an edible chocolate picture.

But what really helped put the Utica company on the map was its chocolate postage stamps.

Chocolate Pix began producing pieces of chocolate that looked like U.S. postage stamps. They were sold as novelty items and gifts and eventually made their way into post offices across the country.

It was a big accomplishment for a company that had started right here in Utica.

The business grew quickly. At its peak, Chocolate Pix employed more than 50 people and its products were being sold nationwide. For a time, those little chocolate stamps were one of those products that people around the country were buying without ever realizing they were made in Utica, New York.

The company also continued making its personalized chocolate photographs, giving people the chance to have family pictures, portraits and other images reproduced in chocolate.

Unfortunately, Chocolate Pix’s success didn’t last.

Changes involving postal regulations eventually affected the company’s ability to sell its chocolate stamps through post offices. Since that had become such an important part of the business, the changes were a major blow. By the early 1990s, Chocolate Pix was gone.

Chocolate Pix wasn’t around for very long, but for a while more than 50 people were making these unusual chocolates in Utica and shipping them around the country. It joins a long list of things made here that traveled well beyond the valley, including Horrocks-Ibbotson fishing rods. We also wrote about the locally based Chicago Markets supermarket chain.

And for anyone who happened to buy one of those chocolate postage stamps at a post office back in the late 1980s or early ’90s, there was a little bit of Utica behind it.