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[The following post was commissioned by Dove.]
Heading to Elizabethtown
I’m one of those people who really likes to go behind the scenes. It doesn’t matter what the scene is, I like to go behind it and get the secrets. So combining a factory tour with something I’m already intensely interested in – chocolate – meant that my day at the Mars Dove Chocolate Factory in Pennsylvania, where they make Dove Chocolate, was pretty amazing.
It started out with an early train ride from Penn Station to Elizabethtown. I’d had some breakfast, but hadn’t bothered to bring any food or drinks with me because hello, Amtrak café car! Yeah, um, no. No café car. Nothing. By the time I got to my stop I was absolutely starving. At first I thought I was imagining the smell at the train station – brownies. But I wasn’t. I was smelling warm, fresh-from-the-oven brownies.
Bean To Bar
Turns out that the Dove factory is a stone’s throw from the train station, and what I was smelling was roasting cocoa beans. I cannot imagine living there and smelling that all the time. It would either be torture or heavenly, I’m not sure which. But the fact that the Dove factory roasts its own beans right there is very cool. They say that this plant is “bean to bar” – the whole thing is done right there.
The Dove Chocolate Center of Excellence, as it is officially called, was opened in 2008, and now produces the majority of Dove Chocolates (the rest are made in Chicago – yup, it’s all produced in the US).
When I got to the factory I signed in and got my orientation materials (that smile up there was genuine – I was as giddy as a little kid to be there). There’s no touristy factory tour, we were really going behind the scenes of a working factory and had to gear up.
Luckily, I can rock a hair net and safety goggles like nobody’s business.
Heading down to the factory floor, we were greeted with framed prints of inspirational messages like the ones on Dove Promises wrappers, except these were from factory employees, stating how they were going to make their workplace better. Very sweet touch.
The Dove Chocolate Factory Floor
The first thing that hit me about the factory floor was how clean it was. Like, making microchips clean. Or, you know, chocolate.
The second thing that struck me? There was chocolate everywhere.
Remember, I was still starving. All I wanted to do was reach out and grab some. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to get kicked out. Luckily, one of our tour guides did it for me. :-D Normally the chocolate isn’t eaten right off of the belt because the cocoa butter takes about 24 hours to crystalize – it still tastes the same, but it melts much faster in those first 24 hours.
That’s my this-close-to-drooling look.
We were also shown how there are different codes on the wrappers that are read by the machines.
The machines themselves were fascinating, the way they squirted out the chocolate into molds and shook them around to get the bubbles out. At one point a machine started spitting out empty wrappers because of a jam farther up the line, and after just a few the machine shut itself down and a worker got things going again.
Another machine started dumping bar after wrapped bar into a reject bin, so a worker investigated what was going on – the wrappers weren’t lined up properly. Nothing gets through that isn’t perfect.
I was hoping there would be a giant room full of finished chocolate to dive into somewhere, but the chocolate doesn’t stick around – it’s loaded right on to trucks as soon as it’s boxed up, and is gone, headed for stores. By the time it gets to your store the cocoa butter is crystalized and the chocolate is ready to eat!
Our tour group with our fresh-from-the-line chocolate, l-r: Michelle, plant director Carl Freeman, Alissa, John, me, Rachel, Jennifer, and Colleen.
As it turned out, the factory tour was only part of this amazing day. Still to come: actually tasting the chocolate (in a way I’ve never tasted chocolate before), talking with a chocolate expert (I would really like to add that job to my resume!), and a Dove giveaway for you, my dear readers. Stay tuned, and thanks so much to Dove for this amazing day!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 2, 5, & 7. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Lisa
Wednesday 19th of June 2013
I had no idea Dove Factory was so close!! That is awesome!! I would LOVE to visit one day.
Amy Oztan
Wednesday 19th of June 2013
@Lisa: Isn't that awesome? I also found out that Mars has a big plant in Hackensack. So close...