Chocolate is better where it is made. Book a seat at the slab.
Which Brussels workshop lets you temper your own bar. What the Lindt ticket in Zurich actually gets you. Whether a cacao farm in the Dominican Republic beats a chocolatier in Paris on your one free day. Reviews of the chocolate tours, factory visits and making workshops you can book anywhere.
A museum in Zurich, a slab in Edinburgh, a mould in Brussels, a pod in Hawaii.
The four bookings most chocolate trips get built around. What each one costs, and what the travellers who went say about it.
01The one everybody knowsLindt Home of Chocolate Museum Entry TicketNine metres of chocolate fountain, a tasting room at the end, and a timed ticket. Take the first slot of the day, before the coaches reach Kilchberg.
02The tasting marathonThe Chocolatarium Chocolate Tour Experience in EdinburghTwelve stops through a working chocolate house in Edinburgh, ending at a bar you temper yourself and carry out.
03The one you makeBelgian Chocolate Making Workshop with TastingsTwo hours at a marble slab in Brussels with a Belgian chocolatier, and a box you filled to take away.
04Where it startsMaui Ku’ia Estate Guided Cacao Farm Tour and TastingA working cacao orchard above Lahaina. A pod split open in your hand, then the bars those beans became.
In Belgium the chocolate decision is made street by street.
Brussels sells more of it and Bruges puts it in better boxes, and either city will hand you an apron and a mould for the afternoon. Three kinds of Belgian chocolate day, and what it costs to walk into each.
Belgium invented the praline. Switzerland invented the machine. The beans come from somewhere else entirely.
Two European countries built their reputation on the finished bar, and the tropics grow everything that goes into it. Six countries to start from, and the best chocolate day in each.
A tasting is the cheapest way into a chocolate city.
An hour, six or eight pieces, and somebody who can explain why the Ecuadorian one tastes of green banana and the Ghanaian one of nothing but chocolate. It costs a fraction of a workshop, and it is how most people start.
The chocolate tours more travellers book than any others.
Every chocolate tour we have reviewed →Eight bookings carrying more traveller reviews behind them than anything else on the site, and what earns each one its place.
1
Lindt Home of Chocolate Museum Entry Ticket
Review of Lindt Home of Chocolate in Zurich, with unlimited tastings, interactive exhibits, practical tips, value advice, and family details.
From · $22
Read our review →
2
Choco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with Tasting
from $18
3
City Tour, Cruise, and Lindt Home of Chocolate Visit
from $103
4
The Chocolatarium Chocolate Tour Experience in Edinburgh
from $44
5
Award-Winning Geneva Chocolate &Old Town Tour with Boat Ride (3h)
from $131
6
Yarra Valley Wine, Gin, Whisky and Chocolate Tour
from $93
7
4×4 Dominican Adventure with Chocolate and Coffee Tasting
from $59
8
Chocolate Museum Entrance Ticket
from $19
Switzerland turned chocolate into a machine, then built a museum around it.
Conching, milk chocolate and the moulds that carry both are Swiss inventions, and Kilchberg now has a building the size of a concert hall to say so. The lake cruises and the Appenzell cheese farms have attached themselves to it since.
Every Swiss chocolate day →
What a chocolate tour does not tell you until you arrive.
Factory floors mean hairnets, closed shoes and usually no photographs, and most of them shut at weekends and for a maintenance week in summer. Workshops carry an age minimum, normally eight, and a bench count in single figures. Tastings run on dairy, nuts and soy, and very few can work around all three. Farms follow the harvest and the rain.
A museum ticket, a workshop, a day at origin: the three prices.
Every tour on the site grouped by price. A museum ticket and a one-hour tasting both come in under the price of dinner. A day at origin and a private chocolatier do not.
Museum tickets, one-hour tastings and the short chocolatier walks.
The standards: making workshops, half-day tasting walks, factory tours with transport.
Days at origin, private chocolatiers and the wine-and-chocolate coach runs.
Three chocolate days that cannot be faked anywhere else.
Tasting rooms are everywhere. A pod split open on the tree, a bar made from beans that never left the property, and a working factory floor you can walk are not.
Cacao Farm Days
A cacao pod is the size of a rugby ball, full of white pulp and forty wet seeds that taste of lychee and nothing at all like chocolate. Farms in Hawaii, Honduras and the Dominican Republic split one open in your hand, then walk you past the fermentation boxes, the drying beds and the roaster. Most finish with bars pressed from the trees you were standing under an hour earlier.
- 1Maui Ku’ia Estate Guided Cacao Farm Tour and Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,103 reviews
- 2Award Winning Farm Tour: Coffee, Chocolate and Unique Gifts★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 484 reviews
- 3Maui Ku’ia Estate Guided Cacao Farm Tour & Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 137 reviews
Bean-to-Bar Estates
A handful of estates grow, ferment, roast, grind and wrap on the same property, which almost nothing in chocolate does. Saint Lucia and Grenada have the best known of them. You see the entire run on one walk, and the bar handed to you at the end carries the name of the field it was picked in.
- 11.5h Belgian Chocolate Workshop in Brussels (bean to bar)★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 462 reviews
- 2Bean to Bar Chocolate Workshop in Puerto Vallarta★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 381 reviews
- 3Bean to Bar Chocolate Workshop in Barcelona★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 172 reviews
Working Factory Floors
Conching machines grind and warm chocolate for hours so it melts at body temperature instead of crumbling. A working floor lets you watch the moulds fill and the cooling tunnel crawl, and the smell stays in your coat all afternoon. Hairnets and closed shoes are compulsory almost everywhere, and most floors stand still at weekends.
- 1Lindt Home of Chocolate Museum Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 9,329 reviews
- 2City Tour, Cruise, and Lindt Home of Chocolate Visit★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 4,624 reviews
- 3Zurich Sights: Cruise, Lindt Chocolate and optional FIFA Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 1,028 reviews
Mexico drank chocolate for three thousand years before anyone thought to set it.
The metate and the molinillo are still in daily use in Oaxaca, and the beans behind most European bars grow in Honduras, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. A farm morning takes you from pod to bar in one walk, which no tasting room can.
- 14×4 Dominican Adventure with Chocolate and Coffee Tastingfrom $59
- 2Bean to Bar Chocolate Workshop in Puerto Vallartafrom $62
- 3Chocolate Tour in Vallartafrom $39
Four chocolate bookings that will not wait.
Most of this can be arranged the night before from a hotel lobby. These four run on timed entry, a bench count and a working calendar that takes no interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Lindt Home of Chocolate Museum Entry TicketEntry runs on timed slots, and the tasting room at the end has a queue of its own. The morning slots go first.
- 02Belgian Chocolate Making Workshop with TastingsA workshop is limited by benches, usually eight to twelve of them. Weekend afternoons in Brussels and Bruges are gone a week out.
- 03Choco-Story Brussels: Chocolate Museum Entrance with TastingThe museum demonstrations run to a fixed timetable and the guided version only a few times a day. Turn up between them and you are reading labels.
- 04Maui Ku’ia Estate Guided Cacao Farm Tour and TastingA farm runs one or two tours a day and stops for harvest and heavy rain. Nothing about it is available on demand.
By country
By kind of day. Slab, factory floor, farm or tasting room
Brussels, Bruges, Paris, Zurich: the week that almost books itself.
Ghent
LucerneThe chocolate tours added most recently.
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