If one thought a chocolate factory will be like Willy Wonka’s in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with rivers of flowing chocolate in which you can dip, well, it’s anything but that.
You could mistake Nestle’s largest chocolate-making plant in India, in Ponda, Goa, which churns out its blockbuster KitKat, among other brands, for a chemical process plant with its gleaming steel pipes, boilers, long conveyor belts and intricate machinery.
These wafer fingers are then coated with chocolate using a specially designed moulding process, and cooled. The last stage involves wrapping the bars in silver foil and in KitKat’s bright-red packs, all untouched by human hand, and placed in appropriate box sizes and ready to be shipped out. One of the high-speed lines in the factory can pack approximately 50 million KitKat bars a month, depending on the size/format and weight.
The two-finger KitKat was launched in the 1930s by Rowntree of York, UK, and has remained a best-selling wafer brand ever since. Nestle acquired the company in 1988. Annually, Nestle today sells enough two-finger KitKats to go round the world more than one-and-a-half times!
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