New tasty treat at museum after chocolate bar launched
There's a new taste at the region's leading heritage museum after it launched its own chocolate bar range.
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The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley has created Roundoak's Chocolate to sell at Spring Hill Post Office on the museum's new 1960s street.
Available in milk, dark and white chocolate, the bars also have distinctive wrappers and are available to buy from the post office for £2.95 each.
Museum food and beverage manager Rory Shannon said the idea of the chocolate bar had been to sell something that people could keep as a souvenir and the museum decided to stock something unique to itself.
He said: "We've just opened the Spring Hill Post Office and we know that chocolate would have been on sale in there, so some of the brands would still be trading and some of them would have been bought by multi-nationals and so it wasn't really an option that we just put a standard chocolate bar that you can buy in a supermarket on sale.
"We decided the best route was to actually put our own bar of chocolate in place and so we selected a supplier that we could work with to produce our own labelling and then we began the process to try and think of a brand name.
"That got down to about 10 choices, such as Earl's and Dudley's, but we chose Roundoak's as it sounded similar to other brands that would have been around at the time, but it's also a nod to the Steel works that were around in Brierley Hill on what is now the Merry Hill Shopping Centre."
Mr Shannon said the process for creating the chocolate bars had taken about a year to get right, but had been worth taking time on to fit in with the post office and the customer experience.
He said that since it went on sale at the end of June, it had been very successful, to the point where the museum had had to reorder the bars to supply the demand, and said the chocolate bar was all part of the user experience.
He said: "I reckon that if you bought a bar and had a brisk walk, you'd probably finish it by the time you've walked up to the top of the site or you can take it home as a gift.
"It's part of that enhanced experience as it's not just about seeing a museum exhibit, you're in a shop which has been replicated and has characters in there that can tell the relevant tales and have period costumes which reflect that era.
"At the moment, you can only buy it in the shop, so we hope you'll come down to the museum and enjoy it."
