Interactive Experiences in Chocolate World

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A visit to Hershey isn’t complete without a little chocolate and Chocolate World is the place to go. Along with Hershey’s free Great American Chocolate Tour Ride, visitors can immerse themselves in the world of chocolate with a number of fun and interactive activities.

Make Your Own Chocolate Bar

Sure, Hershey’s Chocolate World offers a slew of chocolate treats you can buy but why not create your own chocolate bar and your own personal touches? From the moment you don your factory attire (hairnet and all), you are hands in the chocolate fun.

Step 1 – Developing Your Chocolate Creation

From an interactive display we were able to choose our chocolate base (milk, dark, or white) and up to three fillings to add inside. Plus we could choose to add some festive sprinkles on top to finish off our creation. The interactive touch screens are positioned at different heights, making them accessible for big and small.

Step 2 – Following the Production Process

But the fun doesn’t end there. You don’t actually make your bar by hand but that didn’t seem to bother my kids. We all loved that we could follow our individual bar travel along its creative path, seeing the filling being added and the topping going on. This was so much more interesting than just waiting for the bar to appear at the other end.

Step 3 – Creating Your Custom Packaging

While your custom chcolate bar is drying, you’re invited to get creative with your chocolate wrapper. Each bar comes in a metal tin, stamped Hershey’s, but you can customize the cardboard sleeve that goes on the outside. You could choose your colour and texture for the background, add your name,and include some other Hershey elements. You can imagine my oldest daughter and I took forever trying to get just the right design.

Step 4 – Enjoy

At the end we were presented with our custom bar to enjoy.It might be an expensive chocolate bar compared to just buying one in the gift shop but the fun we had creating them was worth the price of admission.

Chocolate Tasting Adventure

Think all of Hershey’s chocolate is the same? Maybe it’s time for a crash course at Hershy’s University. Don’t expect lectures and pie charts. This Chocolate Tasting Adventure is all about hands-on learning.

We were given our learning aids: chocolate samples, water to clean our palatte betweens samples, and a handy guide (placemat) offering words to best describe the chocolate we were tasting. Our instructor took us through each step of exploring one chocolate at a time: look, hear, smell, taste. And there’s no chewing! This might be harder for younger students to understand.

The taste is all about how the chocolate melts. I was impressed with how my kids restrained themselves from just gobbling the chocolate samples down. It was fun learning a little history about the cocoa beans; so much more entertaining than just going through a display. I think my oldest daughter developed a stronger appreciation about the different types of chocolate. For the kids, I would recommend Magic School Bus’s episode All Dried up found on their holiday DVD. It does a great job talking about how things are connected and can affect the growth of the cocoa beans.

At the end we were all given a certificate of completion and we received a sweet gift for attending.

Chocolate World offers many other interactive ways to immerse yourself in chocolate, from Hershey’s Dessert Creation Studio (on my oldest daughter’s wish list for a future visit) to creating custom wrappers for your store bought Hershey bar or chocolate syrup. There’s even a 3D show experience where the Hershey characters come to life and the Hershey Chocolate House. Can you imagine a house over 12 feet tall all covered in Hershey’s candies? I can’t believe I missed seeing this.

Chocolate World is a great stop for interactive fun and holiday gift shopping. We certainly found a few stocking stuffers as well as Hershey’s Kisses Advent Calendars for the kids.

Thanks to the folks at Chocolate World Public Relations for giving us the chance to immerse ourselves within the chocolate experience.

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