Cocoa 'Snow' Falls on Swiss Town After Chocolate Factory Mishap

Imagine walking outside to a light dusting of cocoa on the hood of your car, as the smell of chocolate lingered in the air. That sounds like the kind of scenario you'd find in the first chapter of an imaginative kids' book, but it also actually happened in Olten, Switzerland.

Last Friday morning, some Olten residents could've been forgiven for thinking they were having a shared Roald Dahl-ish fever dream. According to the Associated Press, the Lindt & Spruengli chocolate factory had a slight problem with its ventilation system while it made roasted cocoa nibs, and a combination of HVAC issues and high winds left a light sprinkling of cocoa powder on the surrounding streets. (That might've tested the willpower of anyone who was walking into the Migros Fitnessclub, just 350 meters away.)

A Lindt & Spruengli representative said that "one car was lightly covered" and it offered to cover the cost of cleaning any affected property. The company also said that the cocoa dust wasn't in any way harmful, and that the ventilation issue had since been taken care of.

The Lindt-dusting wasn't nearly as dramatic as the "small technical defect" at a chocolate factory in Werl, Germany that caused a literal ton of liquid chocolate to spill into the street. In December 2018, a delivery tank at DreiMeister overflowed, and West Street was coated with a tasty but problematic mess.

The chocolate quickly cooled and hardened, which meant that two dozen firefighters had to use shovels and pickaxes to break it up and clear it out of the road. After the fire crew and DreiMeister workers had collected all of the chunks and carried them away in boxes, the still-slippery roadway had to be cleaned with hot water and a roofing torch.

Tobias Teutenberg, a 33-year-old Werl resident, was the first to call the cops and tell them about the four inch thick chocolate spill. "A thick mass came out of the door and was moving towards the street," he told a local news outlet. "The policewoman at the other end of the line had to laugh a little when I said 'Something strange is happening here.'" (One of the first officers on the scene suggested calling local kids to bring buckets and 'a drawer' to help them clean it up.)

In 1919, a fire crew's attempts to put out a fire at the massive Rockwood & Company chocolate factory in Brooklyn, New York, sent a river of raw cocoa, sugar, and butter spilling into Flushing Avenue –– and a lot of kids showed up ready to do their part.

The gloopy mixture clogged the storm drains, to the absolute delight of everyone who was prepared to eat their way through the damage. "Little fellows fell on their knees before the oncoming flood and dipped it up greedily with grimy fingers," the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported. "An hour later, when every face was liberally smeared, an emergency call to the truant department was answered by several automobiles. Chocolate-gorged truants, some with faraway looks in their eyes, were hauled off to school."

So, uh, is anybody else dying for a candy bar right now?