Chocolate Nation opened on 27 March 2019 at Koningin Astridplein 7, across the square from Antwerp’s Centraal station, in the building that also houses the Radisson Blu hotel. It covers 4,000 square metres, employs the equivalent of 70 full-time staff and cost €11.5 million, none of it public money. In October 2025 it counted its millionth paying visitor, which makes it the second most visited museum in Antwerp after the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.

A showroom, by design

The man behind it is Jeroen Jespers, founder and managing partner, who before this co-owned Joehoe, a company that builds entertainment projects. He owns Chocolate Nation together with the De Nolf family. Jespers was clear from the start about what he was not building. “No old-fashioned museum,” he said before the opening, “but a chocolate experience that titillates all the senses.” The partner for the content is Barry Callebaut, the chocolate maker based in Wieze since 1911, and the rooms also show other Belgian brands and smaller makers.

Chocolate Nation is a brand showroom more than a museum, and it is the better for admitting it: the city already has museums for Rubens and for printing, in the Plantin-Moretus house on the Vrijdagmarkt, and none of them hands out ten kinds of chocolate on the way out. It calls itself the largest Belgian chocolate museum in the world, a title with a carefully placed adjective. The city liked the idea from the start. “Our tourism offer is becoming not only broader but also more attractive for a new group of tourists,” said Bart De Wever, then mayor, when it opened.

From the equator to the Scheldt

The visit is self-guided, with an audio guide, and takes 70 to 90 minutes. There were fourteen themed rooms at the opening; the museum’s own pages now count fifteen. The route starts on the cocoa plantations near the equator and follows the bean to the cocoa warehouses of the port of Antwerp, then on to traditions, history, brands, moulds and chocolate sculpture. Automatic doors, light and sound effects and short films move visitors from one room to the next, and a dispenser of chocolates greets them in the first.

Near the end comes the production room, where chocolatiers give demonstrations and where visitors can book workshops to make pralines and mendiants; the website currently lists 447 of them. At the opening the chocolate department was led by Patrick Aubrion, who had worked with Pierre Marcolini and helped launch Callebaut’s ruby chocolate. The last room is the tasting: vats of melted chocolate from very dark to milk, ruby included, ten flavours in all, laid out like a wine tasting and suitable for any age.

Octave, the shop and the price

The food bar and restaurant next door is called Octave, and it serves chocolate-based dishes, desserts and cocktails; Gault&Millau gives it 12 out of 20. The shop is free to enter every day. The rooms hold meetings and parties for 20 to 350 guests, and a newer programme of evening openings, called Nocturnes, and a chocolate tour of the city by tram have been added since. For chocolate at the top end there is the tart that has been the house signature at the Dôme in Zurenborg since the Chabberts arrived.

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An adult ticket is listed at €19.90 on Chocolate Nation’s own site, as is a ticket for visitors over 67; students and teenagers pay €18.50 and children from four to eleven €14.50, with under-fours free. Prices include VAT, the audio guide and the tastings. The museum opens every day of the year, holidays included, from 9:30, closing at 18:30 from Sunday to Tuesday and at 20:00 from Wednesday to Saturday. Train travellers on the national railway get a discount, which matters for a museum whose front door faces the station.

The view from Cologne

The obvious comparison is across the German border. The Imhoff chocolate museum in Cologne was opened by Hans Imhoff on 31 October 1993 on the Rheinauhafen peninsula, also has 4,000 square metres of exhibition space, has worked with Lindt & Sprüngli since 2006 and receives about 650,000 visitors a year, with a three-metre chocolate fountain as its centrepiece. Chocolate Nation’s million in six and a half years is a smaller number, reached by a private company that took no subsidy and opened 26 years after Cologne.

The milestone was marked in October 2025 with a cake that the mayor, Els van Doesburg, helped to cut. “I come from a family of chocolatiers,” she said, “yet I had never visited Chocolate Nation before.” The tourists coming out of Centraal station, across the Koningin Astridplein, have no such excuse.

📷 Featured image: © Stad Antwerpen – Ana Izamska