If you’re going to have an industrial accident in your town, you could do a lot worse than this one: The small city of Olten, Switzerland, received a gentle dusting of cocoa when a famous local chocolate factory experienced a malfunction, according to the Associated Press.
A plant associated with the Lindt & Spruengli chocolate company — the folks who make the famous Lindor truffles advertised around Christmas — ran into trouble with one of its ventilation systems late last week.
The company said that a line of crushed cocoa nibs was affected, resulting in a spewing of fine, chocolate-scented powder outside of the building. (Cocoa, or cacao, nibs are crushed bits of dried, fermented cocoa beans that go on to become chocolate.)
The accidental blast of cocoa dust got picked up by the wind and scattered around the area. Luckily, Lindt reported that the chocolatey cloud was harmless to the environment and any humans who happened to encounter it.
And since the cocoa was yet-to-be-sweetened, it probably didn’t taste that great. (This is what I’m telling myself, anyway, because I’d like to live in a place where there’s a threat of chocolate raining from the sky.)
The town of Olten shared a quick pic on Twitter Saturday to demonstrate the confectionary fallout:
Kakao-Regen im Oltner Industriequartier: Lüftungsanlage ist schuld daran https://t.co/O9Iorni5Iz pic.twitter.com/3LWZCsHeE0
— Olten (@olten) August 15, 2020
Translation: “Cocoa-rain in Olten’s industrial quarter: The ventilation system is to blame.”
Though the sprinkling of cocoa wasn’t terribly delicious, it’s one of the more charming items people have discovered falling from the heavens.
In 2000, Great Yarmouth, a town in the U.K., was pelted with fish raining from the sky. According to a meteorologist, a storm out at sea likely sucked up the fish, which dropped from the clouds when the storm made landfall.
Nearly 100 years before that, in 1902, globs of mud fell out of rainclouds and onto towns in the eastern United States. A massive dust storm in the Midwest took the blame for that one.
All things considered, most of us would prefer the cocoa powder!
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