Going to a museum with children? The enthusiasm of the youngsters is likely to be restrained. How about an adventure world garnished with chocolate instead? Buy it! In Halle, Halloren combines exactly that: The “museum” offers a look into the history of the cocoa bean, the Adventure world provides information about the production of the sweet treat that is so popular with children, and in the chocolate factory the kids even get to be chocolatiers. Our testers Martha and Liselotte, both eleven years old, took a close look at the range for us. These are their five highlights:
Video: Halloren Adventure World in Halle: Visit to Germany’s oldest chocolate factory
(Camera/Report: Camera: Jessica Quick, Editing Christian Kadlubietz)
1. Create your own pralines or broken chocolate
The best comes last when visiting the Halloren adventure world. But the chocolate workshop is at the top of the list of highlights! After the tour through the history of chocolate, Martha and Liselotte can get creative themselves. Six pralines or a piece of broken chocolate, what would you like? The latter is currently trendy, so our testers made a quick decision.
Everyone is given a piping bag filled with warm milk chocolate and is allowed to pour it into the mold for the bar. Smarties, pretzels or marshmallows – everyone can decide what other ingredients they want to use. The selection is huge. Around twelve different toppings are available in the middle of the table.
Tickets to be won! In our free family newsletter “Parents’ Corner” we are giving away five times two tickets each for the Halloren adventure world and chocolate workshop in Halle. Register and participate.
Whatever isn’t used up can be eaten. The girls don’t need to be told twice. There’s not much left over. Once the bars are decorated, they go into the fridge for 30 minutes. Time that can be easily passed with a hot chocolate in the Halloren Café. Lieselotte’s conclusion: “Really cool! Being able to design your own chocolate as creatively as you want it to be was a lot of fun!”
2. Taste the diversity of the cocoa bean
“Wow, there are so many types and varieties of chocolate,” says Martha, amazed. At every corner in the adventure world, you can touch or taste things. The Olmec people in what is now Honduras in South America are said to have been using cocoa beans as early as 500 years before Christ. Tour guide David Horn shows what such a fruit looks like.
The – admittedly bitter – bean fragments can be sampled a few rooms further on in the “bean-to-bar facility”, i.e. from the bean to the bar. The cocoa bean has to pass through five machines before it becomes chocolate. At the end, everyone can see for themselves how it tastes. In fact, there is a lot to sample in the three hours. In one corner there is a kind of chocolate tea, in the factory shop there are all kinds of Halloren products.
You might also be interested in: The extremely high cocoa prices are also putting pressure on Halloren. Company boss Darren Ehlert relies on high-quality products.
Be careful: if you can’t hold back, you’ll pay the price later in the form of a rumbling stomach. Martha’s conclusion: “It’s great to be able to taste everything. I even found the tea and the beans interesting – even if neither tasted as good as they smelled. Definitely: a museum for all the senses!”
3. Be amazed and gain knowledge
Who brought the cocoa bean to Europe? What coincidence helped the pharmacist Rodolphe Lindt to soften the coarse-grained chocolate in 1879? And why was Halle at the forefront when it came to chocolate?
Our testers are amazed during the tour through the world of chocolate. The two then ask again on their cell phones that Lindt & Sprüngli shares are the second most expensive in the world. In fact, Chat-GPT replies, the shares are often in the six-figure range. Both conclude: Interesting!
4. Participate everywhere and try everything
Here you can pull out a drawer with old chocolate packaging, there you can arrange a sliding puzzle with Mignon advertising, the predecessor of Halloren, or play a memory game with chocolate motifs – the museum is nicely prepared for children.
New is the black light dream, a room that takes guests into the jungle of South America. Perfect for selfies. Martha’s conclusion: “I’m going crazy!”
5. How long does it take to eat a chocolate house?
There is also this: a city relief of Halle made of chocolate, the city’s coat of arms made of chocolate, Georg Friedrich Handel made of chocolate… Halle’s old town hall made of chocolate! “How long does it take to eat that?” asks Martha. Tour guide David Horn starts to do the math: “That’s 1,000 kilograms of chocolate. At around 20 grams per day, it would take 100 years to eat the whole house.” If you eat a bar every day, you’ll manage it in 27 years. Lieselotte’s conclusion: “Wow, what you can do with chocolate!”
The tour through the adventure world, the chocolate workshop and the factory outlet lasted three hours. Even if it doesn’t look like Willy Wonka from Roald Dahl’s children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, our testers were impressed by the visit. “There was a bit too much talking at the beginning,” complained Martha. But the homemade chocolate made the visit perfect.
