you won't get my chocolatey secrets: a cadbury factory tour

apparently, here in new zealand everyone thinks you're going to steal their recipe for everlasting gobstoppers.  so it wasn't a big surprise when we went to tour the cadbury factory that we weren't allowed to take our cameras.    but if you are wondering what it's like inside, it's pretty much exactly like this ... http://youtu.be/RZ-uV72pQKI (please ignore the strange 10 second anime intro)

one thing i have to say about cadbury is that they know how to run a tour ... a woman in a purple oompa-loomap-esque jumpsuit led us around the factory, her pockets laden with mini cadbury bars.  sometime she would pose a question to the group, such as, "where does cadbury get their milk from?"  the answer is right here in new zealand, and if you answer correctly, you get a piece of chocolate.  and if you answer incorrectly, you also get a piece of chocolate.  and sometimes you get a piece of chocolate just for climbing several flights of stairs or holding the door for someone.  brilliant.  i love the reward system.  i am way more prone to actively participate if chocolate is involved.

this actually would've been very helpful on a 4x4 excursion we took in tahiti.  our tour guide would stop for easily 15-20 minutes at a time and ramble on about various tahitian things, asking us questions that we didn't know the answers to and then waiting an uncomfortably long time before finally telling us the answer.  this process could've been made much more pleasant if there had been miniature cadbury bars involved.

the highlight of our tour was when we watched the chocolate "waterfall" inside a large chocolate silo (the silo housed chocolate and was not actually made of chocolate) ... the waterfall rapidly dumped one ton of chocolate in a rather spectacular cascade.  the tour guide told us that one ton of chocolate is worth about $5,000 NZ ... when asked what purpose this waterfall served in the chocolate making process, our tour guide said, "none ... it's just really cool." ahhh, new zealand.

by the end of our tour we had accumulated quite a large variety of cadbury products, not to mention all the chocolate and/or marshmallow-centered items we ate along the way.  (i think there is an unusually large amount of marshmallow here in NZ)  needless to say, we felt a bit ill upon exiting our tour.  and then we were suckered into eating an unprocessed cocoa bean, which tasted absolutely awful, and only got more repulsive the longer you chewed it (as shown here at right)