What’s the Wrap on Hershey’s Innovation Lab?
A chocolate fix and creative boost sound like one of the best combinations in town, and Hershey’s Innovation Center has it. We visited the Create Your Own Candy Bar lab, located at Chocolate World, and all the kids – including kids at heart, not age – walked out with custom-made, custom-wrapped, hunks of chocolate. For $15 per person and a hair net, everyone can put their creative juices to work.
Your first decision is selecting which kind of chocolate you want for your bar (although I was disappointed that dark chocolate was not yet available). Next up, you’ll view a select list of goodies to choose from that will fill the inside of your bar; things like vanilla chips and graham cracker crust. (No worries for the peanut allergic, there are no peanuts in the place.) Once you’ve picked your sweet indulgence, you’ll watch through the glass as your candy bar moves down the production line and the appropriate candies shake out into your creation. During the official cooling process, Hershey staff will escort you to the Design Center, where you’ll then get to make your personalized candy wrapper, complete with your name lazered into the side.
The design isn’t entirely from scratch, or I’d probably still be there, but it does offer your choice of background color, up to three pictures (logos), your name, and the ability to point and drag your designs around the wrapper. While the options do spark your imagination, the kids in our group, ages 10 and 8, needed help understanding how to change colors and make selections on the computer screens. (I wouldn’t recommend this for really young ones.)
The design experience is interactive, colorful, and entertaining for those who like creative stuff. Hershey will need to figure out how to assist people at the computer screens, however, the idea is fun for most ages.
To add to the interactive element, Hershey could let me type in my bar code on their website and find out where my chocolate is from, or where my select candies are made, why they are healthy (relatively speaking) or some other fun facts. They don’t do anything to send me back to their website or engage me in other media and rope me in to other products, services or their brand.
Aside from media, Hershey does offer plenty of options under one roof. If your custom creation isn’t enough chocolate, you can take a free ride around Chocolate World. Their creativity (and free 3-hour parking) make the Innovation Center a pretty sweet deal.
