So a long long time ago, my family and I lived in England for like, a year. Just before we went back after twenty years for a holiday, we had a brief discussion about whether we should visit the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. My mom remembers it as mainly for little kids (my sister agreed, although she didn’t really remember it), but my brother and I really wanted some chocolate. We were actually split 3-3 in terms of votes, until my dad pulled the “I’m paying for most of the trip” card and I got the green light to pre-book the tickets.
Cadbury World
I read something online about parking being an issue, but because we arrived at about 10:00, we had no issues finding a spot. When we went in, this is what we saw:
On the bright side, we can see the entrance. On the not-so-bright side, we missed our entry time and had to wait about 20min for the next entry.
I did think it was pretty cool that they had people walking along the lines to entertain the kids. Everyone seemed pretty happy to wait.
We got 3 bars of chocolate each at the entrance, which made my brother extremely happy.
The first part of the ‘tour’ was basically a history of chocolate. That I already knew and my mom says that it’s like what she remembered seeing all those years ago, but the rest of the place was new.
After the history, we experienced:
- A funny talk about Victorian England, which set the stage for
- More history, this time about Cadbury
- A video about the history of chocolate, complete with smells and changing temperatures.
When the edutainment section was over, we moved on to a photo-taking area (we skipped this) and a tour of the packing plant (it was not in operation when we were there – you can skip this too because there’s nothing to see). Along the way, we picked up another bar of chocolate.
There’s also a Cadabra ride, which features talking cacao beans and is definitely for little kids.
When the ride was over, we entered an area where we could get our own melted-chocolate-with toppings treat, see cadbury staff make chocolate, and admire chocolate statues like this one:
The live demonstration part was probably the most popular part of this area.
After this, we went through a few more exhibitions, such as one about Cacao Life, Cadbury’s alternative to FairTrade and a section of the history of Cadbury’s marketing – that one was pretty interesting.
We exited to the World’s Biggest Cadbury Shop! This is the only place the entire trip where I found my mint oreo chocolate. I’ve been searching for these since I saw them in Singapore (where they then promptly disappeared, never to be sold again).
We couldn’t dally for very long at the store because we also booked the free Christmas show.
It’s basically a magic show and I suppose I wouldn’t be so impressed if I saw this every year, but you don’t really get this in Singapore so my family and I were entertained.
The younger members of the family were very excited about getting even more free chocolate.
It seems like they’re pretty strict about timing for this show, so if you do go around Christmas and want to attend, make sure not to be late!
Here’s the Cadbury factory from the outside. Looks a lot more like a factory from this angle.
This area also has the 4D Chocolate Adventure which was very fun. It reminded me of the 4D rides that used to be at Genting but chocolate-themed. There was a bit of a queue, but we didn’t have to wait for very long.
There’s also a pretty big playground, which my brother and sister enjoyed.
Thoughts as an ‘older’ visitor
I am definitely biased because I love chocolate, but I found Cadbury World to be pretty fun. Most of it is aimed at younger kids but my family enjoyed the tour, even the reluctant three. That said, I don’t think we’d want to do the tour again. If we ever went back to the Birmingham area, I would want to go back to the Cadbury shop and stock up on my chocolate (if it’s there) and try the restaurant (which we didn’t have time to go to), but I wouldn’t want to go on a tour. Oh, but I like history-stuff so I might want to wander around Bournville for a while, just to see what it was like.