6 tonnes of sheer bliss: the world’s largest chocolate bar

When the 100th anniversary of UK chocolate legends Thorntons was approaching, the management team asked staff for suggestions as to how they should mark the occasion. Plenty of great ideas were fielded, but one really grabbed their imagination. When stock controller Paul Bell suggested making the world’s biggest chocolate bar, they knew they were onto a winner. Personally, we think Mr Bell just wanted to order enough stock to reach his Christmas bonus in a single day, but what do we know?..

Better luck next time, USA

It may sound simple on the surface, but making the world’s largest chocolate bar is no easy task. Especially when the bar to beat weighed in at a whopping 5,443kg or 12,000lbs for the anti-metric among you. That’s a lot of chocolate. So while they didn’t keep the record for much longer than a few weeks, we tip our hat to Chicago-based World’s Finest Chocolate for a good effort. It just goes to show, not everything in the USA is biggest – or best!

Too big for the factory floor

So, to give you an idea of the scale of this mammoth bar, you should first know that it was so huge, they had to make it in the factory car park. First came the 4m x 4m x 30cm chocolate mould, swiftly followed by an inflatable marquee to house the project. Because the mould was outside the factory, it had to be filled by hand. So a small army of 50 employees and volunteers spent 10 long hours carrying buckets of sweet, melted milk chocolate out to the car park and filling the mould. They then had to wait 3 whole days for the bar to solidify and cool down.

If only Roy Castle were here

And so it came to pass, that on 7th October 2011, a chocolate bar using the same recipe as Thorntons standard milk chocolate bar became the Guiness World Record holder at 5,762.5kg. Containing 29 million calories as well as a metric butt-load of sugar, cocoa, milk and other stuff, it’s officially the biggest chocolate bar ever. At roughy the same weight as 2 adult elephants, you can understand why they needed a crane to turn it over so the mould could be removed. And to give you an idea of the scale of this thing, it’s the equivalent of 72,406 of Thorntons stadard 80g milk chocolate bars.

Here’s a video of how it all came together

What happened next?

So what’s the answer to the question that’s on everyone’s lips? Apart from where did everyone park their cars while this was going on? What happened to the supersized chocolate bar? Rumour has it that it was so enormous, they used axes to break it up into smaller, more manageable chunks. After that, they gave some to employees, and then sold pieces to the public in their chain of shops to raise money for charity. Eat your heart out, Belguim – when it comes to making chocolate, the UK is ready to take the crown.

Images from Thorntons