Nick DiGiovanni - How Chocolate Is Made

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Watch to the end to see us also break the official Guinness World Record's largest chocolate bar! It was way bigger than you would imagine...

The Bia Rai. Embarked and profite. Embarked and celebrate. Rigolet. Publié. Savour. Admirate. And profite. Vyaray.

The voice that we love that am. The Scotia Momentum Visa Infinite Plus card gives me 4% cash back on all of my monthly bills. With cash like that, I can upgrade my subscriptions to be ad-free. Because I've got enough. Distractions. Conditions apply. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think. Chocolate is one of the most popular foods on the planet, but did you know it all comes from this weird-looking fruit shaped like a dinosaur egg?

In this video, I'll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made, and at the end we'll use all the chocolate you'll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the world's largest chocolate bar, and it all starts with the cacao tree. This right here is where it all begins. This little flower here will eventually grow into a pod, which will eventually grow into something slightly bigger, then bigger, then even bigger, and then finally into something like this. So, yes, technically, chocolate does grow on trees.

So now that you have some context on where cacao comes from, I'm going to introduce you to a really close friend of mine, who I call the modern day Willy Wonka. He's a little crazy, but he knows more about chocolate than anyone on this planet. Hey, what's up? Oh, dead. You come to see some cacao. I'm ready for chocolate, baby. Let's go sit. So these guys have already picked a bunch of pods for us to look at.

Oh my gosh. Cacao really kind of does look like a big ice cream cone. The seeds can come right off of the cacao pod like that. This is all going to be opened up now so they can take the seeds out. There's no machine. All the chocolate that. we eat is harvested by hand. For the world record that we're going to attempt later in this video, we need 250,000 cacao pods. So this is just the start. So you can eat this right now and you suck

off all the white pulp on the outside of each seed. When you don't dry the cacao beans, they're purple inside. It tastes a little bit like lichy, pineapple, citrusy, kind of almost like a bit of a sour banana sometimes. It's phenomenal. There are two main things you can do with this cacao fruit. You can drink the juice of the cacao fruit. Think of cacao water like coconut. But 10 times better. And then what's the other thing? Obviously, chocolate. You take the beans, ferment them, grind them, turn them into chocolate.

Let's go see how it's made. That's it. Before we go to the actual chocolate factory, we're at the place where they make the cacao water. We separate the pulp from the beans. Beans goes to make chocolate. Pulp goes to make cacao water. We put it into the cold press machine,

getting all the cacao water out. And that's going to be the freshest cacao water you'll ever taste. Ever. It looks a little like coconut water. It gives you a little bit of a kick that you can kick that you get from biting a lemon slice and it just tastes kind of tropical. Chocolate is bitter, sometimes sour, earthy. This is sweet, fresh, citrusy, but never in a million years would you think that this kind of flavor is associated with chocolate.

If you want to get creative, you can also turn this fruit pulp into cacao fruit leather. You guys know how much I love making fruit leather, or even these chewy cacao fruit snacks, which look a lot like ground turkey while they're being made. But now that we've seen how you can use that fruity outer part of the beans, we'll go see how the inside of the bean is used to make chocolate. We've made it to the chocolate factory. And take a guess at what's in all these different bags around me. If you guess cacao beans, you'd be right. But these beans can't go inside the factory

until they've been fermented and dried. Fermenting the beans is an important step that allows them to develop all of that chocolatey flavor. In about a week, they'll go from looking like this to something like this. You can smell their fermentation. Yeah, like a little bit like yeasty sourdough bread. Exactly.

What would a chocolate bar taste like if you didn't ferment? Very bland, flat, probably just bitter, boring, nothing like interesting. And then you take this to the drying process. Once all the cacao is laid out to dry, it just sits here in the hot Ecuadorian sun. And there's so much of it that I can literally make a chocolate snow angel.

All these seeds that are drying here, they flip them over every 15 to 30 minutes to make sure that they're constantly being moved and that new ones are in the sun to dry. And we haven't made chocolate yet, but it's already starting to smell like chocolate. So once the seeds are nice and dry, they're all broken open like this. And on the inside, we get what looks a lot like a dinosaur egg.

But if you actually break all this apart in your hand and crumble it up a little bit. Those are cacao nips. People put them on things like smoothie bowls all the time. But if you grind these together into a paste, sort of like if you grind peanuts into peanut butter, it makes this sort of chocolate paste, which we're gonna go see now.

Welcome to the Hershey's Chocolate Factory. This is about as close as you're ever gonna get to real life Willy Wonka. You can see here that they have this huge hose with perfectly smooth chocolate paste. But just moments ago, that chocolate paste was in the form of these cacao nips. So this liquid chocolate paste

can literally be turned into anything now. Correct. It's like eating a liquid chocolate bar. It is like eating a liquid chocolate bar. Now that we're in the Hershey's Chocolate Factory, I have two goals today. First, I want to see how Hershey's Kisses are made. Because I've seen some cool videos online and it looks awesome.

And second, we need to make some chocolate bars. Now we're in the room where the Hershey's Kisses are made. In front of us is this giant crazy machine that's pumping out Hershey's kisses. 24 hours a day. There's some debate as to why historically they've been called Kisses. So Milton Hershey developed the Kisses in the early 1900. Story goes that because of the product kissing the belt, that's how the name was created.

I mean, seeing this right now, that would be my guess. And you make 70 million of these every single day. Seventy million kisses a day. After the depositors, now we go through the cooling tunnel, where we cool the kisses for their solid. Look how long this tunnel goes down. I can hardly even see the end of it. There's a continuous belt that the kisses ride on

going through cooling so that way the kiss is hardened. You can see a small break right here in the tunnel. This is where our operators can do their quality checks. They take kisses offline, check to make sure that the shape is correct. And they also weigh them off to make sure that they are the correct And so that's a laser that's checking every single Hershey's Kiss to make sure that it's the perfect little shape. I love how they're all kind of taking a little jump right there too. Now finally the exit here and now they're cool.

Right, they're ready for packaging now. Kisses come here onto the belt and go through a system of laining that gets them ready to go into the individual wrappers. Look at that. What a cool view. I wonder how many Hershey's Kisses I've eaten in my life. Like a good chunk of this assembly line. As you see here, we've got the further separation or chicaning of the kisses that we can go into the infeeds of the wrappers. When they're just coming out the line, they look so perfect. That's the goal.

So you see the shape of the kiss, the way that's had that little bit of a bevel on the bottom, and it comes up to a point at the top. The nice thing is most of the time they end up looking like this when you get it in the package. Sometimes you put in your pocket and melts, you ruin your pants. Now that we've inspected all the Hershey's kisses, they're good to keep moving. From here, they'll start to get diverted to either side to go to one of these wrapping machines. So as the belt empties out here, this arm comes out to pull more kisses into the in-piece. There's tons of Hershey's kisses.

And they're all doing the same thing. Everything is mesmerizing. I appreciate Hershey's Kisses so much more right now. From here, from this infeed belt, the kisses then are single-filed through this chicaning system here so that way they can go individually into the wrapper to have the flag and foil applied and then wrap. So as the kisses come out of the conveyor, they go down this chute and onto then a conveyor belt. We have that spiral in there so that way we're hidden in the kisses as delicately as possible. So they look as pristine for the consumer as they do when they came off the line.

So they all get sorted by that big machine. And then they come here to get individually weighed and measured out. The kisses are coming through. We got a vibratory conveyor to feed them in. And then each of these individual buckets has wayhopper scales to know how much kisses are in it. The computer system inside the bagger then dropped the right combination of scales to make the target weight from wherever bag size we're running. After all the kisses are sorted out, now we have to package them into bags. And this roll right here is where it all starts.

So the kisses have been weighed out to the perfect amount. and then they drop through here and go straight into these bags, which then go onto this conveyor belt right here. Now that conveyor belt will take them to our case packers. The bags come down the conveyor, and the robotic arm then is placing them into the case into the right configuration based on the item that we're running. After the case they're filled, they come through,

they go through a vibrator to shake out the bags inside the case to make sure they fill in properly. The robotic head now is going to go over and it's going to pick up cases and it's going to put them on in the right orientation it needs for the load this building. And this is a finished bag. I can open it. You can open it here, yep. Oh, it even smells fresh.

You can smell the chocolate. And they look good. It passes the inspection for me again. This is the start of the chocolate bar process. We're running extra large bars today on this line. And obviously we need extra large chocolate bars to try to break the world record later. So this makes a lot of sense.

So the mold come through here. They're tempered to the right temperature before they go into the depositor. Then the depositor is dropping the right amount of chocolate into each of those cavities in the mold. After the chocolate's put it in the mold, we've got to get the chocolate into the whole full cavity of the mold. So through this cabinet,

The molds go side to side and through vibration, the mold gets shaken and the chocolate distributes throughout the whole mold. We're trying to get air bubbles out and fill up the whole cavity. So the candy comes out of the shaker cabinet and then it goes into our cooler. This is me for scale. It's a big fridge. And you can totally see now that they're already cooled off. You know when you've been at home when you have an ice tray that you're trying to get the ice out of and you kind of bend the ice tray on either side to push the ice out? That's what's happening right here with all these chocolate bars.

This machine is basically doing exactly that. So after with mold twisters, the cany goes through. the demolding cabinet where the molds are turned upside down and the chocolate is separated from the mold and onto the demolding belt. And then this belt is priming the rows. So that way instead of mold groups, you have them lined out in rows. So how many bars do you make every day? So across all the lines here at West Hershey, we make about 9 million bars a day. That's more than enough to make a world record. We've got a quality check these too. Take that one. Oh. It's one of those little blocks as a pip. So we're taking a look at it, making sure that they're all there and they all say Hersey. This looks even more perfect than the pisses.

It's shimmering in the light here. I'm looking up close on this thing. I don't think I see anything wrong at all. It passed the shiny test, but let's see if it passes the crack test. Ready? Three, two, one. Oh yeah. I think these are winners.

All marks in a good temper and a good bar. We saw the bars downstairs and then they get lifted up here by this conveyor belt system and then they're going down this line. Right, here into the in-feed. So these lasers are hard at work because every time they see an empty gap between the bars, they speed up the other conveyor belt to catch them up to the bars ahead of them. That's right. That's amazing.

So after the lasers give them all together, we then have the turning belt. The turning belts are turning the bars. So that way they're end to end as opposed to side to side to feed into the wrapper. More lasers. They're controlling speed. We have other ones that are looking for gaps in the bars.

Also for broken bars. If there's any broken bars, it's going to reject those down here so that way they don't get wrapped. So if one of the bars somehow breaks, the laser sees it. And then that little thing right there blows it with air and discards it. How are they wrap? We've got the film here, which again,

similar to like we saw in Kisses, we have the roll stock that goes through, fed through the line and it's wrapped around the bar. All in high speed. You can see them down in here. See the bars feeding in. The wrap goes around the bar and it's sealed. This whole wrapping system is crazy to watch

because there's so many different ways and twists and turns. There's a lot going on. When the machine stopped for a second, you can see how the packaging kind of feeds over the top of the bar. But the machines started moving again, so I couldn't finish my sentence. The bars come out of the wrap when they go through the wheel,

Tripperhead pick them up and put them onto the trays. It moves incredibly. Incredibly fast at the end each time. That's just using suction, just air to pick them all up and then stack them up perfectly So that they can then go into boxes once we've seen all that chocolate get boxed up it goes around these crazy Converer belts that go all over this entire building these are one of the things that makes it feel in here like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory Now that we've made more chocolate than you could ever imagine let's take all that chocolate and try to make the world's largest chocolate bar Over the next 24 hours this warehouse in Ecuador will be completely transformed from this to this to the chocolate chocolate. I'm gonna warehouse in Ecuador will be completely transformed from this to this.

We can't build this chocolate bar outside because it's about 95 degrees in Ecuador. So we're bringing all this chocolate from the farm to a giant warehouse, which is going to be air conditioned, and that's where we're going to build the bar. This is pretty fun. Let's go break the record. Currently, the Guinness World Record World's largest chocolate bar is 383 square meters in size. And behind me is the layout for a 400 square meter chocolate bar. If we pull this off, this bar will be the same size as a full-size basketball court, weigh the

same as 183,000 regular chocolate bars. And if you melted it, you'd have enough to fill 80 bathtubs. With all of that chocolate that we're bringing inside, this is going to be happening all day long behind the scenes. The whole team here is just going to be unpacking boxes and boxes and boxes of chocolate. As we know, Guinness World Records is very strict. We have to clean ourselves off really well. Then hair nets on. Then we have to put these funny looking things on our shoes, and we can step on. It's showtime. Oh, let's do it. We're going to start by placing the bars down in the middle of this whole mat. But it has to be one full chocolate bar to count as a record.

So what we have here is just a bag of melted chocolate, basically like a chocolate hot glue gun. And we're going to very carefully go in between all the chocolate bars so that everything starts to stick together. Oh, wow. That looks crazy. That's so cool. Well, now we just got 9,000 more to go. Now that we've started working on the bar, I know I've already given you guys some comparisons, but just so you understand, it's going to take 11 tons of chocolate to fill this whole white mat here. That's about the same way as two fully grown elephants.

And if you ate a square of this every single day, it'll take you 30 years to finish it. Look how long this chocolate bar is already becoming. It's crazy. Look at Odette. Here comes Willie. How's it feel to be trying to make the biggest chocolate bar in the world? When you are a Willy Wonka,

you make the biggest chocolate bar every day. But this time, it's gonna be the biggest I've made it in my life. By the way, guys, I haven't talked about this yet, but this room smells really good. Chocolate. We are having a lot of people come and help throughout the day because it's so much chocolate. It's already what?

An hour? I hope we're gonna make it on time. The name of the game here. is speed. I always get so nervous in the corners because it's like, did we mess it up or will it fit? The moment of truth. Is it going to fit? Like a glove. What do we do if it didn't? Fire the opa-lupa. What's the name of this big kid in the movie of Charlie and the chocolate? Cut the cameras. Augustus Gloop? Yeah, Augustus Gloop. That's the kid. I have an idea. You go to that end. I'll go here. We'll race to the middle.

Augustus ready? Fire this guy right now. Nick, ready? Yes. It's got to be perfect still, Pat. Mine's going to be more perfect than yours. The key to winning this race is to stay cool, calm, and collected. Usually in life, I like to stress, and then it all works out. I think I'm going to go over to Pat's side before he even gets like a quarter of the way down. I'm almost there. Pat, I'm so far past the middle already.

And the thing is also about doing it nice. Not just pouring chocolate all over like a crazy man. You need to start it from the beginning. Look at that, Nick. Yeah, that's out of the race. Out of the race. Everyone's yelling at me today. So right now, my oompa and I are lining up all the chocolates so that we can have it ready for them to pipe in.

that warm chocolate and glue it all together. Oh. Dennis, have you seen any violations today? Things are going very well right now. What if anybody eat any of the chocolate? You can't eat the chocolate right here. I'm taking another room. Have you eaten any chocolate?

No. You're lying. The risk factor for me is very low. Who? Did you get that on camera? Nick, what happened? The lights went off. One thing we're dealing with during this record

is once in a while right now in Ecuador, they're having an issue with the energy grid. And so the lights just shut off sometimes. It should come back on with the generator. The most important part, though, is the air conditioning because it's 95 degrees outside, and it could melt this chocolate. This is bad. It's been five minutes now.

They're using flashlights over there right now to keep working on the chocolate bar. I think that's the generator. That sounds good. That sounds good. Oh, it just went off again. This is really not good. Now, I've been 18 minutes with no power. Starting to freak out, guys.

It went from bad to worse. We need power. Be crazy if it went on, like, right now. Well, at this point, guys, it's been over 30 minutes with no power. So we're going to get back to work in the dark because otherwise this is never going to get finished. I'll tell you what worries me.

Yeah, what's that? No power, no AC. Yeah. If this starts to melt, it's over. It's not only over, it's like, what are we going to do with all this mess here? It's going to go all over the place. It reminds you what happened in the movie.

You know, you were there. I already feel that the chocolate is getting a little softer. Willy Wonka, what do we do here? Honestly, there's no solutions, not in my chocolate Bible. So we just got a bad update from the health inspector. The temperature is 75 right now. If it gets above 80, the chocolate's gonna start to melt. And if we get to 80 degrees, video's done.

No record. Dude. It's actually getting very hot in here. Oh! We're back. I can feel the AC back on. Temperature is starting to come down. As long as it just holds out, you're gonna be back on schedule.

With the lights finally back on, we can start building again. But this chocolate bar is taking way longer than we expected, so I'm just gonna show you guys a really cool time lapse. And now we're 50% of the way through on this chocolate bar. As you can see, we had to bring in a few extra helpers. We were never gonna finish this thing otherwise. We've done about 80 rows out of the 106 that we need to do to complete the entire chocolate bar.

I think it's the biggest chocolate mirror. Look how shiny it is. Literally, you need the Willy Wonka sunglasses. The shine means that it's been perfectly tempered, which means when we snap it later, it should have a perfect snap. Plak! We've sort of been patrolling throughout the day,

and word on the street right now is the corner in the back there is working a little bit slow. We're gonna step in and help them out. Look at all your chocolate all over you. Look at this. This is a real lumpa lumpa. How did you get all this chocolate on you? I love chocolate.

You love chocolate. I think it looks cool. And you smell delicious. We started today at 7.30 a.m. And now it is 7.22 p.m. And in this last corner, we're now down to just 10 squares left. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, Alright Nick, here it is.

You guys ready for the reveal of what we hope is about to be the world's largest chocolate bar? We did it! After 22,000 pounds of chocolate and lots of teamwork, this is unofficially the biggest chocolate bar ever made in the history of the world. But now it's up to the Guinness World Records officials whether this is a new world record. The current world record for the largest chocolate bar by area is 383 square meters. After all the measurements, you have a chief, Guinness will record skydoll.

Yes! Woo! None of this chocolate will go to waste. We're gonna break this whole chocolate bar up and give it to kids all across Ecuador. Wait, wait, wait. I literally just realized we never tried it. Oh yeah.

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