Build Your Own Chocolate Bar in a Nashville Candy Classroom
An hour in the classroom behind Goo Goo's shop floor: taste the chocolate first, then load a mold with whatever you want.
Third Avenue South runs a block off Broadway, and the storefront at 116 keeps a red door at the back of the room. That door is the classroom entrance. Walk in past the candy counter, keep going, and an instructor hands you an apron to keep.
The hour splits roughly in two. Tasting comes first, working through several of the company's chocolates and a sample of the cluster it dates to 1912. Then the ingredient bar opens and the bar you build is yours to spec: chocolate shell, filling, and whatever you decide to pile on top.
Nothing here asks for skill. Gloves, a mold, a spoon, and a room of people making the same decisions you are.
Classes run Thursday through Monday, and one booking covers up to eight travelers. The child rate opens at age 3 and matches the adult rate exactly. Fees and taxes are already inside the ticket price.
Nashville's Goo Goo Chocolate Tasting & Candy Making ClassGoo Goo Chocolate Co · 60 minutes · from USD 55 per personwww.viator.comTasting First, Then the Mold
The tasting end of the class is guided. An instructor walks the table through what separates the chocolates in front of you and where the original recipe came from: caramel, marshmallow nougat, roasted peanuts, and milk chocolate, assembled in a copper kettle at a Nashville candy plant in 1912. The company's own telling puts the naming on a streetcar conversation, where a school teacher heard that Howell Campbell's infant son had just said his first words.
The build end is quieter. Everyone gets a mold, a chocolate shell to start from, and a run at the ingredient bar. Sprinkles, pretzels, crushed cereal, nuts, and caramel sit in glass jars down the middle of the table. You spoon in what you want, and it goes back to set.
Finding 116 Third Avenue South
The building sits steps off Broadway. A red neon oval hangs over the entrance, and the shop floor takes the front of the room: clusters by the box, bonbons, branded shirts, and four touchscreen kiosks along one wall. The classroom is past all of that, through the red door.
There is no parking at the building. The company points visitors to the Music City Center garage, the Premier Parking 222 garage, and the surface lot at 127 Third Avenue South. Downtown garage rates are on you, and none of that sits inside the ticket.
Who Fits in the Room
The child rate opens at age 3 and runs through 11, and every booking needs an adult on it. Both rates land at the same USD 55. The listing marks the space wheelchair accessible throughout, with prams and strollers allowed in the room and service animals welcome.
Skill is not a filter here. The company pitches these classes at beginners and repeat visitors alike, and the instructor carries the technical part.
Why a Candy Bar Got Its Own Building
The company's account of the original is specific. A roundish mound of caramel, marshmallow nougat, roasted peanuts, and milk chocolate, awkward to wrap next to the rectangles everyone else was turning out, and the first retail confection to mass-produce more than one element at a time. Before it, a bar was chocolate or caramel or taffy, one thing at a time.
The recipe has not changed, by the company's own account; the wrapping did. Early clusters went out hand-dipped and unwrapped from drugstore glass. Then came foil, folded by hand. Machines took over later, which is how they reach shelves today.
Classes run Thursday through Monday. Start times are 10:00 AM, 11:30 AM, 1:00 PM, 2:30 PM, 4:00 PM, and 5:30 PM, and the class itself is sixty minutes. The shop floor keeps its own hours, 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, seven days a week.
Cancel at least 24 hours before your slot for a full refund. Inside 24 hours, nothing comes back.
Whatever you build goes home with you, along with the apron. The four kiosks out front take walk-ups with no ticket and no reservation, which is the shortest way to make a second one before you leave the block.