Chocolate Delights
A childhood in cocoa-growing Brazil gave Mike Davies a taste for chocolate. 'I don't just like chocolate, I love it,' he says, which is just as well given that he is chief executive of Thorntons, named in a survey as Britain's best-known chocolate and confectionery brand.
"There's no meltdown in sales of chocolate", This Is Money says.
Chocolate. It's not the first association you might make with Cologne, home of the famous "eau de".
Yet my first stop on a culinary trail of this little-known gourmet treasure takes me to a Chocolate Museum. And it's not some small affair tucked down a side street either. In 1993, the late Dr Hans Imhoff, a director of the Cologne-based Stollwerck chocolate company, spent the equivalent of €£32m opening a massive three-storey steel and glass edifice on the banks of the Rhine.
My guide explained that at its peak, before the Second World War, Stollwerck was the biggest chocolate producer in the world, employing upwards of 12,000 people, making the southern side of the city the German equivalent of Bournville, or Hershey, Pennsylvania. Yet now, the only chocolate made here is in the small show-factory on the second floor of the museum where you can see the mixing, rolling, conching (stirring over heat) and packing processes up close.
The museum is full of little delights, from the mini-rainforest where they're attempting to cultivate their own cocoa beans (no luck so far) to the collection of beautiful art-nouveau chocolate-vending machines. But best of all is the delicious hot chocolate and chocolate gateaux on sale at the riverside café, made with the museum's own chocolate.
Source - The Independent