The huge learning centre and chocolate museum was launched last year with disastrous timing. You may have expected the company to have temporarily put the dust sheet over it and wait out the pandemic.
But in fact, Lindt has changed the structure of their experience and kept the doors open.
The company which used to do personalised tours has now adopted a more traditional museum approach, using high tech audio guides and a Pandemic compliant limitation on numbers via a website booking system.
Interested in what the experience would cost, I checked prices. A quite reasonable CHF 15 ($16) is levied for an adult and CHF 10, ($11) for older children. You must book in advance presumably as a Covid precaution, and you walk around with an audio navigational aide that anyone who frequents a museum will be familiar with.
The tour lasts about 1 hour, during which you will learn about cocoa is harvested and processed, and of course how Switzerland become the capital of chocolate. No chocolate history lesson will be complete without a chapter on the Mayans and the cocoa they drank.
After the children are thoroughly bored, having been told they were going to a chocolate factory, and not appreciating the history lesson, you will move on quickly to looking at how chocolate is made today.
This includes a glimpse at their factory which operates in what looks more like a ‘clean room’ environment that you see in high-tech microchip fabrication plants than the Willy Wonka image some disappointed children may have imagined.
The testing ‘Pilot’ factory operates behind glass walls allowing visitors a tantalising glimpse into the machinery behind such a vast production.
Any chocolate tour without a chance of tasting, of course, would be a cruel denial, but Lindt comes through here with an unlimited tasting session. Something the parents of young children might want to take into account if they have a long drive home.
You are able to book online for single or family tickets, although I believe groups are not allowed until Covid restrictions are lifted. You can find out more and book tickets here.