This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Zürich
As we stood in a very Swiss orderly line of chocoholics outside the Lindt Home of Chocolate museum, waiting for the doors to open, a strange quiet descended — even among the school children. There was reverence and anticipation in the air, as if this were more of a pilgrimage, a visit to the mothership, rather than a trip to a museum.
And mothership is the word for this vast futuristic white building just outside the centre of Zürich, designed by architects Christ & Gantenbein, which even has its own dedicated bus stop, “Lindt & Sprüngli”, across the road. But this is no Wonka-style chocolate funfair — the emphasis here is on Swiss innovation and precision (although there is a 9m chocolate fountain, with a wide rim at the bottom to stop any wannabe Augustus Gloops from leaning over too far).
As well as illustrating the chocolate-making process from roasting and fermentation to conching (the process which grinds the cacao into a smooth liquid) and tempering, the museum tells the story of the 19th-century “Swiss pioneers” who rescued chocolate from its gritty, bitter, unpalatable past by adding milk powder and sugar to produce the melting, sweet substance that has been the enemy of our waistlines ever since.
The day before, on arriving in Zürich on a Swiss International Airlines flight, I was handed a small square of chocolate wrapped in the colours of the Swiss flag, a taste of the country before I had even stepped foot on the tarmac: sweet, milky and with a worryingly low cocoa percentage. From Nestlé to Lindt, via Toblerone and Suchard, this is the stuff that the country is famous for, rather than the 85 per cent cocoa variant I am hooked on. The Swiss produce more than 180,000 tonnes of chocolate per year, and are themselves the largest consumers of it in the world at an average 8.8kg per person per year. Whether the alarming current cocoa shortage will change that remains to be seen.
But thanks to a small group of disrupters, there is a new type of chocolate in town. The second leg of my pilgrimage led me away from industrial production to three producers in Zürich who are quietly revolutionising the face of Swiss chocolate — bringing back the bean to the bar, creating single-estate chocolate with exciting flavour profiles, high cocoa percentages and very few added ingredients.
As well as making incredible products, they insist on sustainability and transparency in everything from their relationships with cocoa suppliers to the way they import their beans and recyclable packaging. Their bars can be bought online (although currently shipped only within Switzerland), in several stores in Zürich or purchased at the source.
Laflor
Uetlibergstrasse 65, 8045 Zürich
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Range: 11 different bars, drinking chocolate (70 per cent and 100 per cent), various other products
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Output: Eight tonnes in 2023
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Cost: From SFr9.30 ($10.50/£8.25)
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Visit: Laflor’s factory is open for visits, guided tours and to purchase chocolate on Thursdays and Fridays, 3pm–6pm (except public holidays)
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FYI: Laflor can be bought at the Schwarzenbach delicatessen in Zürich
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Website; Directions
Laflor was founded in 2018 by a group of four chocolate-mad Zürchers, Zelia Zadra, Ivo Müller, Heini Schwarzenbach and Laura Schälchli, who were determined to create a Swiss chocolate brand that was focused on cocoa flavour but was also highly sustainable and ethical.
Laflor has developed close relationships with farms in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. Beans are shipped by sea freight to its small factory in central Zürich, where everything (apart from peeling the beans) from roasting and conching to tempering and packaging takes place on site. Even distribution is done by electric bike.
While Laflor are purists when it comes to ingredients — only organic whole milk powder, sugar and cocoa butter are used — they are open-minded about cocoa content: their bars range from white chocolate to 100 per cent. On my visit to Laflor’s HQ, Laura Schälchli broke up several bars for me to taste, explaining the individual complex flavour profiles of each and how each cacao harvest produces a different taste. Favourites were a 74 per cent bar from Hacienda Limon, a farm in Ecuador, with flavours of honey and malt — “very nice in the morning,” Schälchli said — and a Brazilian 70-per-center from Fazenda Vera Cruz, with tobacco notes and an earthy, fruity acidity. But tastiest of all were the Bread-Crumb Dragées — crunchy “upcycled” breadcrumbs dipped in dark milk chocolate.
Garçoa
Butzenstrasse 60, 8038 Zürich
Franziska Akert, one of the founders of female-led chocolate company Garçoa, came to chocolate via cheesemaking, which is, as she told me, not that odd as “both are all about fermentation”. She learnt about the cacao drying and fermenting process on a trip to Peru in 2012, and it opened her eyes to a new type of chocolate that “was much more interesting than anything that was being made in Switzerland”. Garcoa was born in 2016 with similarly high ethical standards to Laflor: beans are imported from farms and co-operatives in Ghana, Guatemala, Peru, India and Uganda, and all the rest is done in house.
Garçoa’s chocolate is made from just two ingredients: cacao and organic raw cane sugar. “People ask why we don’t make a milk chocolate,” Alert told me. “They are afraid of the bitterness of dark chocolate.” Garçoa, however, is not: its cocoa content does not descend lower than 70 per cent — any lower and it gets trickier to temper without cocoa butter — but only goes up to 90 per cent. The bars, each with a varied thickness and surface texture throughout (all of which affect the way you taste), are packaged in cool, futuristic envelope-wrappers with colourful cosmic designs.
This is chocolate to savour like fine wine as the flavours unfold on your palate. Indeed, as Akert puts it: “I wanted to make a chocolate that has the same value as a bottle of wine. I want people to feel they can bring a bar of this to dinner.”
Taucherli
Fabrikhof 5, 8134 Adliswil
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Range: 30 bars and chocolate-covered nuts
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Output: 40 tonnes per year
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Cost: From SFr6.90
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Visit: Chocolate tours during summer
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FYI: Taucherli can be bought in Globus, Jelmoli, Alnatura and other gourmet stores in Zürich; it will soon be distributed in the US
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Website; Directions
With its bright, boldly wrapped bars, Taucherli is the biggest and most playful of these three labels, and Kay Keusen, the founder, is a larger-than-life chocolate fanatic who is so wedded to the bean he even has tattoos of it (a large cocoa bean on one forearm, and a chocolate bar on the other). Keusen came to the trade after working in construction and consultancy, and on acquiring a small factory in the suburb of Adliswil set up Taucherli — named after the Eurasian coot that is often seen dipping and diving in Lake Zürich — in 2015.
Keusen sources (mainly organic) beans directly from his suppliers in Colombia, Cameroon, Mexico, Ghana, Bali and Nicaragua. Unlike Laflor and Garçoa, he occasionally makes an exception for the use of vanilla in certain bars and is not afraid to experiment however with wacky additions such as popping candy, rose petals and rapeseed. His packaging too, with its distinctive black-and-white bird motif and jazzy coloured sleeves, is also on the wacky side, true to his democratic view that “chocolate isn’t hipster, it isn’t high-class — it is colourful, cheeky, funny”. In the past, Keusen’s range has included a “Vaccination” bar (“to get people talking”), a rainbow Pride bar and a bar emblazoned in curly lettering with “Willy Taucherli” — a nod, surely, to Zürich’s very own Wonka.
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