Why the Chocolate Fountain Failed

The headline for this review really gave it away, huh? I do hope you keep reading for details. I have loved chocolate fountains and chocolate fondues (they are not the same thing) for decades now, so when I was offered a Mini Chocolate Fountain from MultiOutools to test and review, I jumped at that chance. Then I got incredibly busy and had to deal with a month and a half long fight against a couple of illnesses in my household, so I didn't get to test this out until before Thanksgiving. I've shared short videos of this on Amazon, but I won't include those videos here because I don't want to slow down your ability to read this review. I was sent this small appliance to review as part of the Amazon Vine program; no other form of compensation was received for changing my report of my experiences with this product in my Amazon review or with this post on The Chocolate Cult.

I am grateful to my small group of family and friends who helped me test this out, knowing full well this was a test, and struggling with me to figure out what it didn't work like it should. Let me break down the problem into different aspects of the appliance.

The instructions were rather simple and left out some key point. No where did it say what they recommended for the cacao or fat percentage in your chocolate. In fact, the information claims you can use this will all types of chocolate but also with cheese, barbeque sauce, and other liquidity foods. The instructions also did not say how much chocolate you needed to melt which is a big problem because if you don't have enough to start adding in more will upset the balance of the food in the bowl and that difference in temperature or thickness matters. 

Using the mini chocolate fountain showed two big design flaws. 

First, the space between the bottom of the augur (also called an augur screw) and the bottom of the bowl you pour the liquidity food into. This means that the liquid needs to be quite thin to even get to the augur so it can be pulled up. How functional would this be for your family or a small gathering if someone had to constantly push the chocolate into that tiny space?

Second, the bowl is not heated very well, so while it kept the chocolate inside liquid, as soon as it hit the top tier it started to cool off and harden up. That revealed the next problem: The tiers were not heated at all. So there are two closely spaced tiers that the chocolate should flow over and back down into the bowl to be pulled back up by the augur. By not heating those tiers, it created a huge backlog of hardening chocolate. Thank goodness that the four feet and wide base kept the appliance from tilting in one direction, but the tiers need to be heated or the bowl temp needs to be much higher so the flowing chocolate cannot cool down quick enough to solidify.

Fourth, the space between the tiers made holding anything in what little flow there was nearly impossible. A pretzel you held sideways would work, but not bigger than a half inch would fit without getting stuck.

The machine was easy to put together after washing the pieces per instructions. Cleaning it was a big production because so much chocolate hardened and spilled as we pushed it gently down to be suck up to the tiers, that it was a mess.

Not a single person of the four who helped me test this was happy about the experience. You can follow my link to it, but I can't recommend you buy it.