“…a largely unsupervised sample area”

This morning we got up early (for us) and went to Maison Cailler a.k.a. the Nestlé factory.

First mama and her kittens this morning:

We stopped for breakfast at a boulangerie.

The drive was beautiful and I stopped to take a few pictures.

There are three swans in this picture.

Cal wanted to cross the Swiss border on foot. It wasn’t as picturesque as I imagined. I imagined this:

Reality was this:

It didn’t matter to Cal. He had crossed the border on foot and was happy.

We arrived at Nestlé…

Bought our tickets…

And went on our tour.

You could touch, smell and taste some of their ingredients including cocoa nibs

Here chocolate was being made live at slower pace than usual so we can watch. At the end an operator was taking the finished product and handing it out.

“There is a largely unsupervised sample area.” The quote is from the Google reviews for the tour.

It’s Cailler’s 200th anniversary. Cailler was one of the first producers of chocolate as we know it today. They merged with Nestlé in the 1900s. According to our audio tour, Cailler tries to source locally when possible and is the only chocolate producer to exclusively use fresh milk in it’s products. They also said they insist on a living wage for the workers of their suppliers and works against child labor/forbids it in the fields where the source from.

There was a little playground at Maison Cailler but we didn’t stay long since we were all a little nauseated from the many samples we ate. I said everyone could buy a chocolate bar to take home but Cal didn’t even want one; he just wanted fresh air.