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Want to support this channel and help us preserve old films? Visit Visit our website This 1970’s color film offers a sweetened look at the manufacture of chocolate related products produced by L.S. Heath & Sons, Inc., showing harvesting at a tropical plantation to production at a midwestern factory, enumerating the ingredients and steps required to produce a commercial confectionary product (TRT 27:46). Heath & Sons was founded in 1914 and produced the famous Heath bar. In 1989, the business was sold to Leaf, Inc., which in turn was acquired by Hershey in 1996. The film was made by Joe and Mary Liz Adair and Panoramic Film Enterprises. Montage: A child ice skating. Ice melting. Flowering dogwood. A swan flaps its wings. Young boys play with a puppy. Autumn leaves. Sunsets. Farmers. River rapids. A seagull in flight. Boating (0:08). Title: “Chocolate!” over raw cocoa beans and a mixing vat (1:05). Aerial views from a jet airliner. Equatorial shorelines (1:19). Theobroma cacao trees’ flowering blossoms. A grove of cacao trees (2:09). Harvesters use long sticks with blades (2:45). A man opens a pod, eats its seeds (3:04). Hands pick harvested pods from the ground and fill baskets (3:15). A basket of pods dumps into a pile. Farmers use machetes to split open pods, extracting seeds, which fill a box (3:41). Hands sweep across fermented beans (4:30). A riverside bean drying facility with a retractable roof. Workers rake beans on the rooftop (4:39). Two men dance barefoot in a pile of dried beans, “polishing” them (5:12). A tropical harbor. Sacks are hoisted aboard a cargo ship (5:47). A sea captain at the helm (6:26). A locomotive. A train driver in the cab. Cars of cargo rush by (6:40). The Heath bar factory in Robinson, Illinois. A sign: “America’s Finest Candy Bar.” Train cars switch and uncouple (7:01). A sack of beans on a pallet (7:33). A knifle splits beans. An arrangement of split beans is examined; notes are taken. The sack is spilled (7:48). Screening and cleaning on industrial machinery (8:16). A storage silo. Beans pour through a roaster and into a hand. Nibs and husks from a winnower (8:38). A Bühler milling machine crossfades to chocolate liquor (9:13). Liquid chocolate pours into a glass beaker, and over powdered milk and sugar (9:25). A tropical sugar cane plantation (9:36). A man in a hardhat walks atop a railroad hopper car. Tons of sugar (10:02). A tanker truck at a dairy farm. Cows at pasture (10:23). A food chemist fills petri dishes with liquids (10:49). A factory worker checks a mixer. Churning cocoa paste drops onto a conveyor belt (11:22). The chemist analyses a fudge sample (11:52). Rollers spin, producing lighter, finer powder (12:29). Conches and the conching process (13:12). A factory operator presses a button on a console. Mixing milk chocolate (13:30). The chemist fills a syringe with chocolate and deposits it into a beaker (13:54). A soybean farm (14:23). Another tanker truck. Lab analysis (14:39). Closeups of California almond trees. A farmer checks his grove (15:13). Roasted almonds are sorted by hand on a conveyor belt (15:50). Industrial mixers. Almonds, sugar, and a beaker of soybean oil. A large copper vat fills with liquid toffee. Heat is applied and the ingredients are mixed (16:03). Liquid toffee is mixed while cooking, then poured out (17:01). Toffee is smoothed by rollers. Scoring knives cut the toffee into bars, which are then sorted by an eldery woman in glasses (17:28). An enrobing machine coats the toffee bars with chocolate. A meter: 932 gallons (18:16). Air jets give Heath bars their signature wavy texture (18:37). The Heath factory and its machinery (18:57). Quality control inspectors gaze upon a torrent of Heath bars carried by conveyor belts (19:24). Dispassionate Heath employees. A packaging machine wraps and boxes Heath bars at rapid speed (20:16). Molded Super Crunch chocolate bars. Boxed “mint truffles” (21:09). Miniature bars (21:45). A typist answers an office phone. Orders feed into an IBM computer. A warehouse pallet truck (22:49). A Heath truck (23:57). A grocery store shopper and checkout (24:33). Carnival games and rides. A cookout buffet (24:47). A little league baseball team enjoys ice cream bars (25:36). The Heath Super Crunch bar debuted in 1971. Heath was sold to Leaf, Inc. in 1989, which was in turn sold to Hershey in 1996. This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit
