A tour for chocolate lovers in Brooklyn, New York, isn’t just about tasting the final product. It also gives a peek at factories, neighborhoods and even business plans.
The chocolate tour offered by A Slice of Brooklyn takes visitors to four chocolate-makers around Brooklyn. “I love chocolate,” said Christine Dietz of San Diego, who was treated to the tour by friends throwing her a bachelorette party in New York. “But it’s really cool that we also get a bit of a tour of the city.”
But A Slice of Brooklyn’s chocolate tour is also part of a bigger trend. Confectioners and tour companies around the country are offering chocolate tours catering not just to the public’s sweet tooth, but also to consumer interest in learning where the products they eat and drink come from.
Photo: AP
EDUCATING CONSUMERS
“Customers care about what they put in their mouths — especially millennials and GenXers,’’ said Pam Williams, founder of the online academy Ecole Chocolat School of Professional Chocolate Arts. “They want to know where their food comes from and how it is processed.”
And while everybody knows that wine comes from grapes, “very, very few actually understand that chocolate comes from the seeds of a tree,” said Williams, who is also co-founder of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association. Inviting customers “into the factory to see the beans and the machinery that turn those beans into chocolate is a very good way to educate consumers on fine chocolate.”
FROM HERSHEY’S TO HIPSTERS
The granddaddy of US chocolate tours is Hershey’s Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It’s hosted more than 100 million guests since opening in 1973. The free tour takes guests on rides following chocolate from bean to bar, with treats and singing cows along the way.
But chocolate tours are offered in many other destinations around the country, from factories to visits with artisanal chocolatiers. Just be sure to plan ahead, as some tours are offered only on certain days and times and some require reservations. Some are free, but others are pricey. The Brooklyn tour is US$50.
Mars Chocolate (makers of M&Ms, Snickers and Dove) offers tours and tastings of its Ethel M premium chocolate brand at the Ethel M factory in Henderson, Nevada, near the Las Vegas strip.
Theo Chocolate welcomes more than 50,000 visitors a year to its Seattle factory . The tour shows how the brand sources organic fair-trade beans, right through the bar-making process.
In Oregon, Portland Walking Tours’ Chocolate Decadence tour visits multiple chocolatiers for tastings in every form: whipped, melted, liquid, beans, bars and more.
Lake Champlain Chocolates offers free factory tours and tastings in Burlington, Vermont.
In Somerville, Massachusetts, Taza Chocolate offers an Intro to Stone Ground Chocolate factory tour , and for children under 10, a Chocolate Story Time weekend mornings.
In Connecticut, you can even take a train from Thomaston to experience Fascia’s Chocolate Factory tours in Waterbury, with wine and chocolate pairings along the way.
Even in New York, A Slice of Brooklyn only skims the cream off the city’s chocolate offerings. Consider tours at Mast Brothers in Williamsburg , Brooklyn; the soon-to-open Harlem Chocolate Factory ; and the 5,000-square-foot Jacques Torres Chocolate Museum in Manhattan.
SLICE OF BROOKLYN TOUR
First stop on A Slice of Brooklyn’s chocolate tours is Jacques Torres’ shop in DUMBO, an industrial district turned chic enclave between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Next, at The Chocolate Room in the Cobble Hill neighborhood, owners Jon Payson and Naomi Josepher explain that they opened the business because they loved going out for dessert but had limited options for sit-down, restaurant-style dessert-only experiences.
In Red Hook, a working-class waterfront area of modest homes and warehouses, the tour strolls to a pier with a view of the Statue of Liberty before hitting Raaka Chocolate to see how the company’s artisanal bars are made, from processing cacao pods to wrapping bars. Flavors include smoked chai and pink sea salt. Last stop: Li-Lac Chocolates in Industry City, a revived business complex in the Sunset Park neighborhood. Li-Lac has been selling chocolates since 1923 and is known for creamy, old-school recipes, but only recently relocated to the Brooklyn site.
And for those who love the idea of touring Brooklyn, A Slice of Brooklyn also offers pizza tours and Christmas lights tours.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s