​Lindt To Open Willy Wonka-Style Chocolate Museum And Tour

Lindt is launching a brand new 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 is located in Keilberg near Zurich, Switzerland.

Due to open on 13 September, the interactive attraction will let visitors into Lindt's wonderful world of chocolate, providing information on the origins, history and production of the cocoa-based sweet treat.

In the foyer of the museum, you'll find 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 huge, hovering wire whisk down into a Lindor ball on the ground.

Once inside, you're then free to roam a 1,500 square metre exhibition space, which each room designed individually to explore a different aspect of the world of chocolate.

One section sees you able to travel to a cocoa plantation in Ghana, where you'll learn everything about the cultivation, harvesting, fermentation and drying of cocoa beans - as well as about the quality assurance process.

A 'Chocolate History' room teaches you all about the 5,000-year history of chocolate, with a digitally animated 360-degree panorama and round media table explaining how the preparation and consumption of the product has changed over the centuries.

A 'Swiss Pioneers' room also shows how Switzerland became the 'home of chocolate', while a time tunnel illustrates the changes in manufacturing and marketing of Swiss chocolate from 1900 until 2000.

In the next part of the experience, a room based on a real-life factory lets you find out 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 features an 'atmospheric projection of stars', you can finally make your way to 'Chocolate Heaven', where you'll be able to taste a sample of Lindt products.

There are also large Lindor balls that double up as photo booths, so that you can mark the occasion with a snap.

But that's not where things end, as before you head off you can cross a bridge over the foyer to the 'Innovation Lab', which looks into 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 specialists develop new chocolate creations, with visitors given an X-ray view inside the machinery through augmented animation.

The tour then comes to a delicious end with a chocolate souvenir, with a small bar of chocolate from the testing system, packaged 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. Enquiries for guided tours and workshops, in which it is possible to design one's own chocolate creations, can be submitted here.

Featured Image Credit: ATELIER BRÜCKNER / Michael Reiner

Topics: Food, World News, News, travel, Chocolate

Jess Hardiman

Jess is a journalist at LADbible who graduated from Manchester University with a degree in Film Studies, English Language and Linguistics - indecisiveness at its finest, right there. She also works for FOODbible and its sister page Seitanists, which are both a safe haven for her to channel a love for homemade pasta, fennel and everything else in between. You can contact Jess at [email protected].

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