Day 7

Today I decided to go to Frey Chocolate in Buchs, Switzerland. Before I get to my adventure at Buchs, I'd like to elaborate on my morning. So after my shower, I go out to the kitchen to make breakfast. I open the fridge to get my eggs and I notice that my carton of eggs is gone as well as my chicken. I look around in the fridge and I see some eggs in the door and a bowl of cooked chicken on one of the shelves. I try cracking one of the eggs and realize that it is a hard boiled egg. I soon concluded that my Airbnb host had hardboiled all of my eggs and cooked my chicken. She was not home at the time so I made some bacon, had a banana, and left for Frey.

The train to Frey was about 2.5 hours. I had to get on a bus to reach Buchs. Once I was dropped off at the Aarau train station, I did not know what bus to get on. I knew I needed to get on a bus with a #1 on it, but which bus, I didn't know. So I got on one of the busses with a #1 on it and asked the bus driver. He kindly walked me over to the proper bus and I arrived at Frey in no longer than 15 minutes. Moral of the story, don't be afraid to ask for help. Most people are more than willing to assist you.

Once at Frey, I went on a virtual tour that explained their bean to bar process. Like Läderach, Frey gets most of their cocoa beans from Central and South America and from West Africa. Ghana and the Ivory Coast are the popular suppliers for Frey. One cocoa bean contains 30-60 cocoa beans and about 60 beans are needed to produce one chocolate bar. These beans are washed, fermented, dried and shipped off to Frey facilities. The cocoa beans are cleaned, sterilized, and dried again at the facility and are then cracked to get the nibs out from the shell. The nibs have a bitter taste and I was able to taste some on the tour. The nibs are then crushed into a fine powder and are conched. This creates a cocoa butter which then Cocoa masse is extracted. After conching, a mixture that is grainy and clumpy is put through steel rollers. A fine powder results and this powder goes into the concher for approximately 20 hours, resulting in chocolate. For white chocolate, cocoa masse is replaced with cocoa butter.

 

Throughout the tour, I learned that the Swiss are the kings of chocolate consumption. Each person in Switzerland consumes on average 12 kg of chocolate each year. That's about 120 bars per person. 42,000 tons of chocolate are produced each year at Frey and 1/3 of this product is shipped abroad. An interesting fact about Frey is that around Easter time, they cast 7 million chocolate Easter bunnies. 

The tour was conducted through pre-filmed videos so the lighting in the area was dim and was not good for pictures. I did take some pictures though but they are low quality.

My favorite part of the tour was downstairs. They had a conveyor belt that had serving plates of all different kinds of chocolate samples. You could eat as much chocolate as you liked. I enjoyed milk, white, dark chocolate squares as well as truffles and other creations from Frey

The taste of each chocolate was amazing, so I purchased some chocolate bars to bring back to friends and family. I was happy to speak in German with the cashier and explained my Magellan Project as well as my excitement to practice German skills. It is amazing to me that as I leave Aarau, everything out my window is written in German. Within an hour, everything is written in French. I just cannot fathom how a country smaller than my home state can change languages so quickly just by traveling an hour away.

I left Frey and headed back on the train to Geneva. Tonight, I am just doing some laundry and solidifying check in times with my next Airbnbs.