Day 2 of Loading: A Review of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory, Dunedin NZ

(by Guest Writer Pien)

Loading is one of the busiest times on the ship. However, if you're not a crew member or a technician or, in lieu of that, very obviously well-muscled, your main job is to avoid being underfoot. We were assigned to help build the Hydro Lab, but they were overstaffed as it was. After two hours of observing and filming, we were instructed to clean up a mild tritium spill in two refrigerators, but they needed at least another day to thaw. We participated in a human conveyor belt to move an entire truck full of food into the freight elevator: boxes of broccolini, tomatoes, strawberries, shrink-wrapped duck. It turned out to be the wrong delivery, so we formed another human conveyor belt to move it all back off the ship. All of this took us to noon.

Faced with the prospect of spending an entire afternoon watching other people sweat, we instead went to town for a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. Their royal purple brochure, adorned with orange swirls, heavily advertised its free samples and chocolate waterfall in a rather misleading evocation of Willy Wonka.

0. After using our expired student ID cards to procure a $2NZ discount, we were instructed to wander through the self-guided area for ten minutes before our factory tour began. There were marionettes and a viewing deck onto the reception area, from which you could observe other people buying tickets. It was pretty empty, but not empty enough: the man-sweat of one stranger overpowered any scent of chocolate we were instructed to detect from the old-school churn in operation.

1. Joe, our guide, was a former factory worker. He provided us with shower caps, which we donned to watch a frightening claymation featuring Mel the Cadbury Man. Joe was big on surprises. He chortled when he handed us our first bar of candy: a "Chocolate Fish," which resembles a strawberry Charleston Chew. "Get ready," he intoned.

2. We stopped outside a nondescript building, shutters locked. Here, apparently, thousands of liters of milk a day are mixed with sugar and turned into "crumble," the basis of chocolate production. There are three giant silos adjacent to the building, in which summer-crumble is stored. Joe says that in winter, the cows produce milk that is less creamy. When full, each silo weighs 600 tons.
Surprises: This one we didn't find out until later. One of these silos is not a crumble holder. Please refer to #6.

3. We clogged the entrance to the factory by stopping at a flow-diagram depicting what goes into milk, dark, white chocolate. Petite Asian women, also wearing shower caps, squeeze behind us pushing large laden carts.
Surprises: Joe was surprised that no women admitted to knowing that cocoa butter was a popular ingredient in face cream. He was, however, unsurprised when the petite Asian women nicked the corner trying to make a turn through the narrow space we'd left. "Women drivers," he quipped proudly.

4. Joe paused in front of the guy who collects Cadbury chocolate buttons into a cardboard box. "Every hour, he measures the size and weight of a button to make sure it's uniform," he said. "This is the most boring job ever." We proceeded upstairs to the Crunchie bar manufacturing area, where Joe explained that the assembly of this product is particularly damaging to the wrists. "We have to rotate workers frequently in this division," he said. Otherwise, the repetitive motion could cause irreversible injury.
Surprises: The chocolate factory really sucks.

5. We head to a platform for a birdseye view of storage, a cavernous warehouse filled floor-to-ceiling with pallets on pallets of Cadbury chocolates in every variety. Joe appeased us with a fishbowl of chocolate bars, from which we are instructed to take one.
Surprises: Dan was impressed by the magnitude of storage. It was, however, only half the size of your average Costco. I was surprised when a reserved, unassuming couple lit into the candy bowls and grabbed not one, but two fun-sized bars each. "You're not supposed to do that," Joe admonished. At the next candy station, Joe distributed the samples by hand.

6. We enter a silo renovated to contain a staircase that spirals around a giant funnel. Joe starts a machine that pours chocolate into the funnel. Over the industrial din, he explains that this quantity of liquid chocolate is reused for an entire year, exclusively for the "waterfall" display. "Once a year we dump it," he says.
Surprises: There is something anticlimactic about a 20-second deluge of chocolate that is turned on for your viewing pleasure. Also, I didn't die from eating chocolate splatters scraped from the railings in the stairwell. I attribute this to the fact that the year is young.

It was kind of like trick-or-treating, except that we paid for it, and there was far less consumable candy.