Lindt Chocolate Museum

You get an audio guide that comes in a bunch of different languages (including English). You touch the guide to specific panels and then listen.

The tour covers cocoa bean harvesting, the history of chocolate in Europe, the history of chocolate in Switzerland in particular, and how chocolate factories work.

The museum was pretty interactive and had interesting displays; the cocoa bean area had a little fake cocoa tree forest, the European history part had projections of different food, and the Swiss history part had painted wood dioramas of factories and landscapes.

Next they go into details of the modern Swiss chocolate making factory. Sev was really into the machines—I thought they were really cool too, and showed in miniature how two different candies are made.

In the middle of this section there are three chocolate fountains to sample liquid chocolate.

At the end there is an area where you can test four different kinds of finished chocolate, it’s cool because you get to sniff and taste them and figure out for yourself what the ingredients are before looking it up.

The next section offers more finished chocolate, Lindt balls of various flavors. A this point I was really thirsty though and was sad there wasn’t a water fountain to quench my thirst after all the chocolate.

Finally there’s the future of chocolate section, which had many exciting and inspiring ideas about what’s next for the industry. You can also watch a chocolate lab live in action make even more chocolate.

At the very end you can watch a marble run-type contraption to get yet another piece of chocolate.

We got in before a huge line formed but by the time we got the chocolate the line was really long and honestly probably not worth the wait. Nevertheless, it did look cool.

There are other activities at the museum, including some short movies you can watch at the auditorium and chocolate classes you can take for an extra fee. Since it was Christmastime there were a lot of displays to take photos with, which was cute. Although it might not be the first stop on my itinerary, this was a fun activity worth visiting if you have some extra time in Zurich.