Here’s how to take something many kids & teens love – chocolate – and turn it into an awesome business learning project.
Ready for a business and entrepreneur project that your kids, tweens, and even teens can really sink their teeth into (kinda literally)?
When my son came home from watching Willy Wonka for the first time in Kindergarten two years ago – determined to create his own chocolate factory – I thought it would be a (cute) passing fad.
I couldn’t be more wrong.
Over the next two years, I witnessed him build toothpick and marshmallow chocolate factories, talk about how to treat his workers and what work hour shifts they would take, work on packaging up his gooey chocolate creations, and spend three weeks’ allowance money on a bag of cacao beans.
I knew this was too good of a learning opportunity to pass up.
That’s why I created The Chocolate Business Project. I knew it was a way for me to teach my own child – and to help parents and educators teach theirs – about SO much to do with business and money.
Like:
- The process of creating a product
- How to price a product
- What goes into packaging a food product for sale
- How to invest in a company, and why you might want to
- And so much more…
Go through even part of this with your child? And they’ll never look at chocolate bars in the grocery store the same, again.
What is The Chocolate Business Project?
The Chocolate Business Project is a series of activities and worksheets on chocolate products and chocolate businesses (like Hershey's and Cadbury's) that'll give your child and students a much better understanding of how business and entrepreneurship work.
Here are the four sections:
- Chocolate Process
- Chocolate Making
- Chocolate Business
- Chocolate Finances
Here is a much more in-depth look, based on my son and I working through this as a summer project together (a summer full of chocolate-eating opportunities? Yep. I was sold.).
Our Chocolate Business Project
As part of this project, your child gets to choose one chocolate company to do a deep dive on. You also get to choose where to do a Factory Tour (either in-person or virtually).
My son decided to do a deep dive into the Cadbury company during his Chocolate Business Project.
And since we live just 3 hours away from Hershey, PA, I decided to take him on a 2-day trip there so that we could really learn so much more about how chocolate is made, what the Hershey company's history is, etc.
Leading up to our trip to Hershey, PA, we prepped by going through some of the project work and workbook at home.
What Do You Know Worksheet
I start the project off by getting an idea of what a child knows about chocolate and the chocolate business.
My son was able to think of about 3-4 chocolate products and two chocolate companies, and he estimated that one typical bar of chocolate costs $10. My niece estimated $25!
Chocolate-Making Process Worksheet
My son read through the chocolate-making process from Harvest all the way to Packaging a chocolate bar in a factory.
We also watched several videos on the chocolate bar-making process (I have a list of recommended ones you can find free on YouTube).
Chocolate Tasting Activity
I kinda feel like if you’re going to do a business and entrepreneur project for kids based around chocolate…then you need to build in chocolate tasting.
That’s exactly what I did.
I created a more kid-friendly tasting mat you can print out and use over and over again to do as many themed tastings as you’d like (we used it to do three separate chocolate tastings. Boy, was my son excited about those!).
Each tasting is based on a theme.
Such as:
- International Tasting: choose chocolate bars that source their cocoa beans from one country or region of the world (a single source chocolate bar).
- Bitterness Challenge: How bitter can you guys take it? Choose chocolate bars on a continuum of cacao percentages (Milk Chocolate, 50%, 70%, 80%, 95%).
- Brand-Specific Tasting: Choose various chocolate bars within one brand of chocolate.
- Competitors Tasting: Choose one chocolate bar of the same type (dark chocolate or milk chocolate, etc.) from various brands to see which you like best.
- Cost Tasting: Do higher-costing chocolate bars taste better than cheaper ones? Gather both, and blind-taste them.
My son also got to start filling in his Tasting Tracker (for single-sourced chocolate bars), checking Madagascar, Ghana, Peru, and Hawaii off of his list.
Chocolate Company Deep Dive Activity
I found it funny that my child chose to focus on the Cadbury company, even though he knew we were headed to Hershey for two days.
He reasoned that he had read so much about the Hershey company already and would learn so much more while there, that he wanted to learn about a different company, too.
I couldn’t argue with that!
I helped him research Cadbury’s current products, and where they source their cocoa beans from.
Some interesting facts he learned during this process:
- They use a blended source of cocoa beans to create their products.
- They license Hershey’s to create and sell their products in the U.S. (this led to a whole new discussion and learning on what licensing means).
Then I took him grocery shopping with me and let him keep his eyes out for any Cadbury products. Sure enough, he found a Cadbury Caramello bar at Walmart! He was delighted and noted that it cost $2.58.
Finally, I found a really cool book (it's an adult book – so we skip around some) called Chocolate Wars. It details a lot about the history of Cadbury, and we’ve read several chapters of it so far.
Competition Worksheet
Either online, or by going shopping, your child will work on identifying competitors of the company they chose for their deep-dive.
My son chose the two competitors, Hershey's and Mars, to look closer at.
We researched their products online.
He looked up the pricing for a regular-sized M&M package and a regular-sized Hershey's chocolate bar. The M&Ms were a different product from what Cadbury sells, and the cost was around $1.24.
He determined that the Hershey Bar is a similar product to what Cadbury sells, and its cost is about $1.32 (cheaper than the Cadbury's bar we found).
However, I pointed out that the Cadbury chocolate bars we found were larger in size than regular-sized Hershey bars (3.5 ounces vs. 1.55 ounces). Also, they had add-ins that would cost more.
Hint: There's more on pricing later in the project!
Our Factory Tour + Trip to Hershey PA Activities
We’re just about a 3-hour drive away from Hershey, PA, and so I decided early on that this would be our factory tour for this project.
Hint: want to take your own child on a factory tour? Here is a free Factory Tour Printable that will help them get even more business and entrepreneur lessons from the experience.
My sister and niece joined us!
My son got to see his first cacao tree (Theobroma Cacao) in person and was over-the-moon excited about it.
We continued learning about Milton Hershey, the town he built, and the chocolates he created at the Hershey Story Museum.
We also learned about the history of products created and sold, and which are still around today.
During the factory tour at Chocolate World (not the working factory – but working parts and videos to show how it’s done), we learned all about how chocolate is currently processed, created, and packaged up.
We also got to see some new products on the market for Hershey (a question in the project workbook).
Then my son and I took a Chocolate Lab class at the Hershey Story Museum.
We learned SO much more about the chocolate-making process than we already knew – lots of details, like how it takes two cacao pods to make one chocolate bar, and what chocolate bloom looks like (we experienced it while trying to make our own bars!) – and we got to make our own bars of chocolate as well (though, not entirely from scratch).
The kids were very excited to receive a whole-sized chocolate bar upon checking in at The Hotel Hershey, and they loved the pool there, too.
All in all, a total success.
Recipe Lab Activity
Your child has the opportunity to create their own signature chocolate bar recipe, as well as price it, and package one whole chocolate bar up as if they were going to sell it.
While my son has created lots of chocolate candies over the last several years, we haven't really done it formally.
We're still working through this project, and I can't wait to update this section when my child creates, prices, and packages up his signature chocolate bar!
Resources We've Ordered From Amazon:
- Chocolate Molds with Foils (note: the foils are too small to cover the whole bar, so you have to use two for each bar you create)
- Cacao Butter
- Cacao Nibs
- Other ideas: edible glitter
Invest Lab Activity
There's a whole lesson + activity on investing, and your child can do this whether you/they actually want to buy a stock in a chocolate company or not.
They'll learn about publicly versus privately owned companies, stock ticker symbols, and how to decide where to invest your money.
They'll also follow along with a Fantasy Pick (or a real pick) over a 7-day period to see what the price does (as well as a look at historical data, too).
Again, my son and I are still working through this project over the summer and we haven't gotten to this section yet. I can't wait to see if he'll want to buy a fractional share of a chocolate company with his allowance, or not!
Hint: Instructions and resources for how to do that are included.
We've reached the end of what I consider to be such a cool project I've gotten to do with my son (and am still working on with him). We're even reading newspaper articles about the dwindling global supply of cacao beans, and what that means for prices (he's a bit worried!).
When we finish eveything, he'll fill in that “What Do You Know?” worksheet again, and will hopefully know a lot more than when we started.
Be sure to check the whole Chocolate Business Project out, here. And I can't wait to hear what your child/teen/students think about it!
Amanda L. Grossman
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