I played tourist today, and took the Ethel M® Chocolate tour, which I haven't been to btw in about 10 years. Not too much has changed since I last went, but the tour did get a little bit shorter since they no longer have the "molding wing" which displayed how the chocolate is inserted into the mold and cooled.
The tour starts in an M&M® gift shop that is colorfully decorated and is nearly a snapshot of its much larger store on The Strip, M&M® World, which is a four level chocolate mecca.
After you browse around the store, you're on your own, through a FREE self guided tour that lets you preview the production and manufacturing operations that go into creating Ethel M® Chocolates. Make sure to plan ahead though to get the most out of your trip. There are only certain times that the workers are in the factory creating these sweet treats. If you come when they're off, it's nothing more than a trip spent staring at heavy candy machinery and reading explanations off the wall.
The tour starts in the mixing room. In this room, when I visited, they were cutting a large slab of caramel into smaller pieces (featured below). I have been here before when they had the cream beaters on, which is somewhat interesting to witness since it looks like creamy chocolate being spun around and smoothed for consumption.
The next larger portion of the tour was in the melting and molding room, which is more animated than the previous. In this room, the chocolate gets melted in huge cylinders (pictured below 1), and then channeled to be deposited into chocolate molds (pictured below 2). As you can see, the machines are mostly labeled above so you can distinguish the different machines and also to understand what exactly, you are looking at.
Just like people though, not everything is perfect in the land of chocolate. If you look close enough, in the second tray, there seems to be a chocolate overload! I wouldn't mind having that piece when it leaves the cooling station ;). All misshaped defects will be gladly welcomed at my house any day hehe. From this room, it's mostly smooth sailing for these miniature delectables. They enter the cooling station, get flipped, then and packaged for their new homes.
The tour starts in an M&M® gift shop that is colorfully decorated and is nearly a snapshot of its much larger store on The Strip, M&M® World, which is a four level chocolate mecca.
After you browse around the store, you're on your own, through a FREE self guided tour that lets you preview the production and manufacturing operations that go into creating Ethel M® Chocolates. Make sure to plan ahead though to get the most out of your trip. There are only certain times that the workers are in the factory creating these sweet treats. If you come when they're off, it's nothing more than a trip spent staring at heavy candy machinery and reading explanations off the wall.
 |
| (1) |
 | |||||||
| (2) |
Just like people though, not everything is perfect in the land of chocolate. If you look close enough, in the second tray, there seems to be a chocolate overload! I wouldn't mind having that piece when it leaves the cooling station ;). All misshaped defects will be gladly welcomed at my house any day hehe. From this room, it's mostly smooth sailing for these miniature delectables. They enter the cooling station, get flipped, then and packaged for their new homes.
The tour takes maybe 5 minutes to walk through, depending on whether you read anything on the walls, or watch the t.v. monitors that explain everything that goes on within the factory. The best part though is at the end, where you're greeted by some sweet sales girls that offer you a sample of their chocolate coins in either white, milk, or dark chocolate. Today however, was my lucky day because they also offered me a complimentary piece of milk chocolate caramels drizzled with dark chocolate. Delish!
If you didn't get your chocolate fix through the tour, they also have an Ethel M® Chocolate shop that allows you to mix and match your own box of chocolates to take home with you.
Chocolate not your thing, or have someone in your group who just doesn't understand the beauty of sweets? There is also a botanical cactus garden that guests are more than welcome to walk around at their leisure and read about the different desert landscape plants. This place has a little something for everyone, and even if your group all loves chocolate, it doesn't hurt to walk around the garden to get some of those pounds of chocolate that you enjoyed out of your system before loading up into the car ;)
0 comments:
Post a Comment