With chocolate truly on our minds 24/7, letting chocolate melt in our mouths slowly gives a big boost to our brain activities and an increase in our heart rate, like just before a passionate kiss! And if our innate love for chocolate, is turned into a full-fledged factory, then I don’t think anyone would stay sane.
Consequently, a favourite of many, Lindt has come up with a brand new idea of initiating a chocolate museum and tour experience this week, and it sounds like Willy Wonka would be very proud indeed.
Planned and designed by Atelier Brückner, the Lindt Home of chocolate found its place in Keilberg near Zurich, Switzerland.
Due to opening on 13 September, the interactive attraction will open gateways to visitors into Lindt’s wonderful world of chocolate, providing information on the origins, history and production of the cocoa-based sweet treat and other valuable insights.
At the entrance, you’ll come across at the world’s highest free-standing chocolate fountain, measuring 9.3 metres high and circulating 1,000 litres of liquid chocolate – all flowing from a towering wire whisk down into a Lindor ball on the ground.
Once you find yourself inside, you’re then free to wander casually a 1,500 square metre exhibition space, with each room designed intricately to explore different aspects of chocolate.
Similar to how a time-machine functions, one section lets you travel to a cocoa plantation in Ghana, where you’ll get to experience everything vividly about the cultivation, harvesting, fermentation and drying of cocoa beans – as well as about the quality assurance process.
A ‘Chocolate History’ room enlightens you all about the 5,000-year history of chocolate, with a digitally animated 360-degree panorama and round media table with an outlook of how the facets of preparation and consumption of the product has changed extensively over the centuries.
A ‘Swiss Pioneers’ room exhibits how Switzerland became the ‘home of chocolate’, while a time tunnel draws the changes in manufacturing and marketing of Swiss chocolate from 1900 until 2000.
Entering the next phase of the jaw-dropping experience, a room based on a real-life factory lets you have a look at how chocolate production works today – with three chocolate springs of white, milk and dark chocolate that you can taste promising a ‘special attraction’.
After checking out the ‘Chocolate Cosmos’, which showcases an ‘atmospheric projection of stars’, you can finally make your way to ‘Chocolate Heaven’, where you’ll be able to treat your taste buds to a specimen of Lindt products.
There are also large Lindor balls that standing as high as as photo booths, so that you can grace the occasion with a snap.
But that’s not the end of it, as before you head off you can cross a bridge over the foyer to the ‘Innovation Lab’, which lists down various questions about the future, such as: can there be chocolate without cocoa trees? How is artificial intelligence changing the production of chocolate? And can chocolate be made in a carbon-neutral manner?
At the heart of the lab is a real testing system, where experts develop new chocolate creations, with visitors given an X-ray view inside the machinery through augmented animation. Unfortunately, the tour then comes to a delicious end with a chocolate souvenir, with a small bar of chocolate from the testing system, designed in a golden ball, rolling through a specially-designed marble run and into your hands.
The Lindt Home of Chocolate is open from 10am to 6pm, Monday to Sunday.