The museum began with an exhibit describing how cacao is grown, harvested, made into cocoa, sold, and traded. Many of the tools, shipping methods, and facts about each country that exports cacao were located in this exhibit.
Moving on, we were ushered into a room cordoned off from the rest of the museum by two doors. The second door would not open until we had stepped into the vestibule, with the door closed behind us. We discovered that the reason for this was that we had wandered right into a natural environment for growing cacao, as well as coffee, mangos, and even papayas! It was nice and warm in there, and we had to wait in a second vestibule to leave.
The next exhibit we came upon taught us about the make-up of different grades of chocolate. White chocolate doesn't even have a cocoa mass percentage, while bittersweet dark chocolate has a cocoa mass percentage of 65%. It was also interesting to see the amount of other ingredients that go into making a bar of chocolate.
We made our way into the next room, the biggest room, and found to our amazement that there was a full chocolate factory set up in there! Hello Willy Wonka! ... But where was the chocolate river?! The machinery was extensive! Here is the machine used to roast the cocoa beans during the first stages of production.
There were also mixers, pounders, crushers, stirrers...you name it, we saw it! Here are some more pictures of the machinery!!
At the end of this side of the room, we came upon a cocoa tree, made out of chocolate, resting in a chocolate fountain! Thats as close to Willy Wonka as I think we're going to get today, but there was a woman dipping wafer cookies into the chocolate and handing them out to visitors, so yum!
At the corner of the room, we turned to follow it down the other side, only to find that it was an assembly line, creating the exact chocolate candies that we had received with our tickets at the entrance to the museum. We watched the chocolate get filled in the molds from a large vat that was continuously stirred...
The trays were then set into a rack where they rested...
Then, they were passed through a machine that flipped the trays, and knocked the small chocolates onto the awaiting conveyor belt...
Finally, the chocolates were lifted, in sheets, onto another machine that passed them through, into a single file line, in order to get wrapped in gold foil!
The result? A delicious little morsel of chocolate that I would have taken a picture of, had I not eaten it already! :)
The exhibit ended with a large room, made to look like a 1930's candy shop, complete with the mascot of one of the many famous chocolate makers, Sarotti. I like these guys!
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