The Ritter Sport Museum

Ritter Sport bars are a strangely named square chocolate bar made in Germany.  Most people really don't understand why they're square, or what's with the strange name.  As it turns out both of these questions are related.  The creator of the Ritter Sport wanted to make a chocolate bar for football/soccer fans.  The problem he noticed is that chocolate bars didn't fit into their pockets very well.  The simple solution is to make a square bar that fits in your pocket, so you can enjoy a treat during sporting events.  While a simple idea isn't enough to keep a chocolate bar company in business for so long, making sure these square bars were made with good quality German chocolate, and sometimes filled with tasty fillings, does.  How popular are Ritter Sport bars in their home country?  Popular enough to build a museum, and I decided to pay it a visit.

The Ritter Sport Museum has two floors of chocolate fun.  The first floor is the official Ritter Sport store, and the second floor is the main museum.  The museum has three main sections, the first part is all about where their chocolate comes from.  It looks at the cocoa bean, how it's harvested, and how all of this effects the environment.

The second part of the museum looks at the manufacturing process that goes into each Ritter Sport bar. It's very basic chocolate making information, but I have a feeling that the folks at Ritter Sport go for quality of ingredients over fancy new technologies.

The final section of the museum focuses on the history of the Ritter Sport bar, and is the source of the information I wrote about at the beginning of this post.  It also talks about some pretty staggering statistics in the number of Ritter Sport bars made in a year.

The ground floor of the Ritter Sport museum is purely dedicated to buying Ritter Sport products.

As you can imagine they had every variety of Ritter Sport bars that they make.

And say for example there was a flavour that you imagined, but they didn't have it on the shelves, you don't have to leave empty handed.  They have that covered because they offer a "make your own Ritter Sport bar" section.  Every day, for a pretty hefty cost, they have chocolatiers on hand to help you custom make your own Ritter Sport bar with hundreds of ingredients to choose from.  They offer more ingredient choices than are even available in their line of chocolate bars including pepper corns, chili, and gummy bears.

If you're happy with the flavours they offer on the shelves, you can pretty much get them in any size or quantity you want.  How about an entire meter of Ritter Sport bars?

A tiny little bar for a quick snack?

Or a giant bar to fill you up for days.

But how will you get these bars home on a warm summers day?  Well why not pick up an official Ritter Sport bar cooler.

Or if you're just going for bulk, and you need an extra piece of luggage to carry it all home in, why not pick up the stylish Ritter Sport carry on bag.

It was a fun day at the Ritter Sport museum, but I have one piece of valuable advice.  Don't eat the giant pile of Ritter Sport bars in the middle of the store, they're for display only.

CC