Living Las Vegas

At Home in the City of Lights

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Drought-Resistant Chocolate

When Forrest Mars, Sr., the patriarch of the Mars chocolate empire, decided to build his retirement project in the howling desert halfway between downtown Las Vegas and Hoover Dam, I’m sure lots of people snickered and called him nuts. Not that a guy like Mars would mind such response. Snickers and nuts are an important part of his legacy, after all. And even if chocolate doesn’t seem like the kind of confection that should be manufactured in a desert, the Ethel M chocolate factory has been doing an excellent job ever since the first truffles rolled off the line back in 1981.

These days, the Ethel M factory is well known to tourists on bus tours to the Dam, but it’s also a favorite among locals, many of whom remember school field trips that, unlike trips to see how the post office works, included free chocolate. They also remember something else that draws them back each year: the Christmas lights on the cactus.

In addition to building a boutique chocolate factory, Forrest Mars constructed a 2.5-acre garden with meandering paths (all conveniently wheel-chair accessible). He planted what has matured into one of the largest collections of drought-tolerant plants in the world, and every December, an army of decorators work (very carefully) to wrap most of them in strings of sparkly holiday lights. “Light Up,” the night the switches are first flipped, is an event lots of locals look forward to every year. Not only does the cactus garden suddenly rival the Strip, there’s usually complimentary chocolate to be found.

As if a chocolate factory and a world-class botanical garden weren’t enough, Forrest Mars built something else that sets Ethel M apart. Beyond the garden is an installation called the “Living Machine,” a one-acre water recycling plant that cleans all the waste water from the factory (32,000 gallons a day) well enough to use it to irrigate all the landscaping. This is accomplished with the help of bacteria, algae, fish, snails, and various microorganisms in a series of treatment containers. Perhaps most remarkable is the utter lack of odor, and the garden-like appearance of the whole operation.

Oh, yeah, and there is a chocolate factory! The tour is “self-guided,” which means you walk in front of big picture windows while videos play on monitors overhead explaining how the candies are made. The first room is the kitchen, and if you’re lucky enough to be there when they’re cooking, you might see huge cooling tables covered with candy or other kinds of fillings turning in huge mixers. I saw chocolate coated caramel apples under construction when I was there the other day, along with a few acres of cooling pecan brittle and a tower of butter waiting to go into a cauldron.

The next room offers a view of several production lines with ingenious machinery that can mold chocolate into the shells that will contain soft fillings. Also visible are “enrobing” machines, which are used for candies with firm centers like caramels and nuts. The centers ride on a grid under a cascade of chocolate to get their top coats, and then pass through a chocolate pool to get covered on the bottom.

This room is worth pausing in for another reason, too. Chocolatiers behind a glass counter offer “complimentary tastes,” and you can also see them make nut clusters up close on a small enrobing machine. When I was there, they were making chocolate-covered strawberries, and they can also take your picture, turn it into an edible photograph, and apply it to a milk chocolate “post card.”

More production lines are visible though more windows, and suddenly you’ll find yourself in — surprise — the chocolate shop. Ethel M makes over sixty different kinds of chocolates, and they’re all here beckoning. You can also get drinks and ice cream, and there’s a gift shop next door that sells garden-related items.

Ethel M is no longer in the howling desert. A bustling community called Green Valley has grown up around it. Whether or not Forrest Mars was amazed to see the city would grow so fast to surround his little oasis, we’ll never know. He died a few years ago. Fortunately, his successors have chosen to keep his remarkable operation going, possibly because serving 700,000 visitors a year is definitely not nuts.

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