The Foreigner's Guide to Slovakia

While I lived in Bratislava teaching English, one of the companies I taught at was Kraft Foods Slovakia, a.s. Kraft owns and operates a factory on Račianska Street in an industrial part of Bratislava, which produces one of Slovakia’s most famous food brands: Figaro chocolate.

Very quickly I realized that the brand Figaro was a force to be reckoned with on the Slovak chocolate market. Their main competitor? The Czech chocolate company Orion, owned and operated by another food giant: Nestlé. This was interesting to me; a “food fight”, so to speak, of Kraft versus Nestlé.

Working in a chocolate factory is challenging; I was surrounded by the scent of chocolate for hours, which I was often offered to sample. Sometimes I’d conduct class with a large tray of varied chocolates that a considerate student had placed before me. As a chocolate lover I could hardly ever resist. On the weekends that I went to visit my boyfriend’s family, I often came with chocolate gifts. It was a sweet time for all of us.

On an office wall in the Kraft Figaro factory, I noticed an old photo of the factory with “Stollwerck” on the façade. It got me thinking, what was the story of Figaro and of chocolate in Slovakia? Another mystery was that there are two distinct brand logos for Figaro. After I asked, I found out that there are two Figaro factories in Slovakia and Kraft Foods International only owns one. I thought, how could that possibly work? Two factories that produce the same brand of chocolate and have absolutely nothing to do with one another? Fascinating. But let me get back to the story of chocolate in Slovakia.

The first major factory for chocolate on Slovak soil was the Stollwerck factory, built in 1896 in Bratislava (the city was still called Pressburg at the time) on what is now Račianska Street. Stollwerck is a German chocolate producer, headquartered in Cologne, and still exists today. In the turn of the 20th century Stollwerck also had factories in Vienna and Budapest. At some point after 1948, after the nationalization of factories under communism, Stollwerck must have lost control over their factory.

In Trnava in 1906, Adolf Fischer and sons established their chocolate factory and, according to an interesting website on chocolate wrappers, in 1934 the company name was changed to Figaro. With the nationalization, Figaro Trnava merged with the Bratislava plant in 1958. Both plants produced Figaro chocolate.

In 1992 with the selling off of state-owned assets, Kraft Foods International acquired the Figaro factory in Bratislava. They may have regretted that they purchased only the plant in Bratislava, however, and not the second in Trnava, nor the exclusive rights to the name, so it seems.

So today, there are still two chocolate factories that produce chocolate products under the Figaro name. The highest volume of chocolate is produced by Kraft Figaro in Bratislava (logo pictured above).

My personal favorite is the tablet of chocolate called čokoláda na varenie – chocolate for baking. This might be an odd choice, particularly since I don’t use it for baking, but I’ve tasted many sorts. This is a very rich, dark chocolate, though not bitter, and I eat only one square, right after lunch, with a cup of coffee. The rich taste satisfies my craving without tempting me to eat a lot, as I would of the milk chocolate.

If you take the tram down Račianska Street today, you can’t help but smell chocolate. Next to Kraft Figaro is a mlyn and pekáreň, a mill and bakery. The combination of these two scents of fresh bread and chocolate is delicious. I’d be curious to know if the residents of Rača consume more chocolate than other Bratislavans. I’d assume so.

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