Ask an Adelaide expat what they miss and there is a decent chance the answer is a red-and-gold box. Haigh’s Chocolates was founded here in 1915, still makes everything in South Australia, still belongs to the family that started it, and has never opened a store outside Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra — which is why a bag of chocolate frogs functions as a legitimate souvenir rather than an airport afterthought.
Two things bring visitors specifically: the Visitor Centre on Greenhill Road at Parkside, where a free guided chocolate experience runs several times a day, and the Beehive Corner store at 2 Rundle Mall, which has occupied the same landmark building since 1915. This guide covers both — how the free tour works and why you must book it, what is actually worth buying, the seasonal products worth timing a visit around, how the company compares with the Australian chocolate you already know, and where else in Adelaide to eat chocolate that is not Haigh’s. Prices and times were checked in September 2026; confirm the current session times on Haigh’s own site before you go.
Quick facts
| Founded | 1915, Adelaide |
| Claim | Australia’s oldest family-owned chocolate maker |
| Visitor Centre | Greenhill Road, Parkside |
| Free chocolate experience | Mon-Sat, 11am, 1pm and 2pm — booking essential |
| City store | Beehive Corner, 2 Rundle Mall — in the building since 1915 |
| Cost of the tour | Free, including tastings |
| Time needed | About an hour at the Visitor Centre |
| Distance from CBD | Roughly 2km south-east of the city centre |
The free chocolate experience at Parkside
The Visitor Centre sits on Greenhill Road at Parkside, on the southern edge of the parklands, and it is the closest thing Adelaide has to a chocolate factory tour. The guided experience runs Monday to Saturday at 11am, 1pm and 2pm, costs nothing, and includes tastings.
Booking is essential. This is the single most important line on this page. The sessions have limited places, they are genuinely popular, and turning up hoping for a spot — particularly at a weekend, in school holidays, or in the weeks before Easter and Christmas — will not work. Book online, well ahead, and treat it as a fixed appointment in the day rather than something to slot in.
What you get is a walk through how the company works: the history from 1915, how beans become chocolate, the difference between what Haigh’s does and mass-market confectionery, and tastings along the way. It is a company-run experience rather than an independent one, so expect a certain amount of brand story, but the process content is real and the guides know their material.
One realistic caveat. Production schedules vary and this is a working business, so what you can see through the viewing windows on any given day is not guaranteed. If seeing chocolate actually being made is the reason you are going, be prepared for that to depend on the day.
Beehive Corner
If you cannot get a Visitor Centre booking, or you simply want to buy chocolate, go to Beehive Corner at 2 Rundle Mall — the corner of King William Street and Rundle Mall, and the most recognisable building in the Adelaide CBD. It is a Victorian Gothic confection in cream and gold with a gilded beehive on the corner, and Haigh’s has traded from it since 1915.
Adelaideans use “meet you at Beehive Corner” the way Sydneysiders use the Queen Victoria Building clock. Walk in, look up at the ceiling, and buy something. It takes ten minutes and it costs whatever you decide to spend.
There are other stores around the city — in the Adelaide Central Plaza, at Adelaide Airport, and in the eastern and inner-southern suburbs — but Beehive Corner is the one with the building. Our shopping in Adelaide guide covers what else is on the Mall.
What to actually buy
The range is large and some of it is better than the rest. The consensus picks, from people who buy this chocolate regularly rather than once:
- Chocolate frogs. The signature item, in milk, dark and white, and the thing to take home. They travel, they are cheap enough to buy a dozen, and every Australian recognises them.
- Peppermint or violet creams. Old-fashioned fondant centres in dark chocolate, and the products that most clearly place the company in 1915 rather than 2026. Divisive and worth trying.
- Rocky road. Dense, generous, and better than almost any supermarket equivalent.
- Chocolate-coated liquorice. Improbably good, and the item most often described by locals as dangerous.
- Speckled eggs, at Easter. A national institution in a small way.
- The dark chocolate blocks, if you want to judge the chocolate itself rather than the confectionery around it.
Prices sit in the premium bracket — noticeably above supermarket chocolate, comfortably below imported European luxury brands. A modest gift box is A$20-35, a large assortment considerably more, and a bag of frogs is the cheapest way to give someone something they will actually be pleased about.
The Easter Bilby
One product deserves its own paragraph. Since the 1990s Haigh’s has made a chocolate Easter Bilby instead of an Easter bunny, in partnership with conservation groups, with a portion of proceeds supporting bilby conservation. Rabbits are an introduced pest that has done enormous ecological damage in Australia; the greater bilby is a native marsupial that has been pushed to the edge partly because of them. Haigh’s stopped making chocolate bunnies entirely. It is a small thing, it is also a genuinely effective piece of public education, and it is the single most Australian object in the shop.
Getting there
The Visitor Centre on Greenhill Road is about 2km from the city centre — a twenty-five to thirty-minute walk south across the parklands, or a short bus ride on the routes running out along Greenhill Road or Unley Road. There is some street parking nearby, and it is an easy stop by car if you are already driving out towards the Hills.
Beehive Corner needs no directions: it is in the middle of Rundle Mall, in the free tram zone, and unmissable. Our getting around Adelaide guide covers the buses and the free tram if you want the detail.
How Haigh’s compares
Australians will tell you Haigh’s is better than Cadbury, which is true but not a demanding standard. The more useful comparisons:
- Against mass-market Australian chocolate — clearly better. Higher cocoa content, no vegetable-fat substitutions, and a much shorter supply chain. You can taste the difference in a plain milk block.
- Against European luxury brands — different rather than inferior. Haigh’s sits in a British-Australian confectionery tradition: fondant creams, rocky road, coated nuts and honeycomb, rather than the ganache-and-praline vocabulary of a Belgian or French maison. If you arrive expecting the latter you will be puzzled by the former.
- Against modern craft bean-to-bar makers — Haigh’s is a bean-to-bar maker, which is unusual for a company of its age and size, but it is not a single-origin, terroir-forward operation. Its strength is consistency across a very broad range, not a 78% Madagascan.
The honest verdict: Haigh’s is a genuinely good chocolate maker and an excellent souvenir, and the free tour is worth an hour of a five-day trip. It is not, on its own, a reason to come to Adelaide, and anyone treating it as a destination-grade attraction in the way Cadbury World is marketed in Birmingham will find it smaller and quieter than expected. That smallness is also rather the point.
A short history
Alfred E. Haigh opened the business at Beehive Corner in 1915, and the company has stayed in the family across five generations. It survived two world wars, sugar rationing, the arrival of every multinational confectionery brand in Australia and the wholesale offshoring of Australian food manufacturing — and it still makes everything in South Australia rather than importing finished product and putting a local label on it.
That last point is the substance behind the sentiment. A great many “Australian” food brands are now owned overseas and manufactured elsewhere. Haigh’s is not, which is why South Australians are disproportionately fond of it and why the boxes turn up at every interstate family gathering. For more on the city’s manufacturing and mercantile history, see our history of Adelaide guide.
If you want more chocolate than one shop
Haigh’s is not the only game in town, and a chocolate-minded visitor has options.
- The Adelaide Central Market has chocolate and confectionery traders alongside everything else, and it is a better hour than a second Haigh’s store. See our Central Market guide.
- The Adelaide Hills — Hahndorf and the surrounding villages have small chocolate and fudge makers, and the region’s cool-climate produce culture supports a decent number of them. See the Hahndorf guide.
- A food tour will usually include chocolate alongside cheese, smallgoods and wine, which is a more balanced way to spend a morning than eating confectionery on its own. Our Adelaide food tours guide covers the operators.
- Menz FruChocs — the other South Australian confectionery icon, a dried-apricot centre in milk chocolate, sold everywhere in the state and almost nowhere else. Locals are fiercely loyal to them. Buy a bag and decide for yourself.
When to go
Two seasons transform the shops, and both are worth knowing about before you plan a visit.
Easter is the big one. From roughly February the stores fill with speckled eggs, filled eggs and the Easter Bilby, and the Visitor Centre sessions book out weeks in advance. If you are in Adelaide in March or early April, book the tour the moment you know your dates. The same applies in the last six weeks before Christmas, when the gift boxes and the seasonal ranges appear and the Rundle Mall store is busy from opening.
Winter is the underrated time. Adelaide’s Julys are mild and grey, the shops are quiet, the tour has spare places, and hot chocolate at the Visitor Centre café makes considerably more sense at 14°C than at 38°C. If you have any flexibility, this is when the experience is at its most relaxed.
Avoid the middle of January entirely if you can. It is hot, the city is on holiday, and chocolate and 40°C are not compatible — see our best time to visit Adelaide guide for the seasonal picture.
Fitting it into a day
The Visitor Centre is not on the way to much, which is the main argument against it. Two routings solve that.
On foot from the city, pair it with the southern parklands. Walk down King William Road or Hutt Street, cross the parklands, take the 11am session, then walk back up through the Himeji Garden on South Terrace and into Victoria Square. That is a comfortable two-and-a-half-hour loop and it costs nothing beyond what you spend in the shop.
By car on the way to the Hills, Greenhill Road runs straight out towards the escarpment, so a 1pm or 2pm session slots neatly before or after a Hills afternoon at Stirling, Hahndorf or Mount Lofty. See our Adelaide Hills day trip guide.
If you only have one day in Adelaide, skip the Visitor Centre and buy from Beehive Corner instead. The tour is an hour plus the walking, and on a single day that hour is better spent on North Terrace or at the Central Market.
Going with children
The free tour works well for children old enough to listen for forty minutes — roughly six and up — and the tastings do most of the heavy lifting. It is indoors, it is seated for part of it, and it is free, which makes it one of the better wet-weather bookings in the city. Younger children may struggle with the talking sections, and the Visitor Centre is not a hands-on, make-your-own-chocolate operation; manage expectations accordingly. Our Adelaide with kids guide has more options in the same bracket.
Practical notes
- Book the Visitor Centre experience weeks ahead, and further ahead in the run-up to Easter and Christmas.
- Do not buy chocolate on day one of a hot trip. Adelaide summers routinely exceed 35°C and a box left in a car is a box of soup. Buy on the way out, or ask about cool packaging.
- Check your destination’s customs rules if you are flying internationally. Chocolate is generally fine, but confirm rather than assume.
- The airport store exists and is a legitimate last-minute option, though the range is narrower than in town.
- Allergens — the factory handles nuts throughout, so cross-contamination is a real consideration. Ask staff directly rather than relying on packaging alone.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Haigh’s factory tour free?
Yes. The guided chocolate experience at the Greenhill Road Visitor Centre in Parkside is free and includes tastings. Booking in advance is essential — places are limited and sessions fill.
What time are the Haigh’s tours?
Monday to Saturday at 11am, 1pm and 2pm, at the Visitor Centre on Greenhill Road, Parkside. Confirm current times on Haigh’s own site, as they change seasonally.
Where is Haigh’s Chocolates in Adelaide?
The Visitor Centre is on Greenhill Road at Parkside, about 2km from the CBD. The landmark city store is at Beehive Corner, 2 Rundle Mall, on the corner of King William Street — Haigh’s has been in that building since 1915. There are further stores in the Central Plaza, at the airport and in the suburbs.
How old is Haigh’s Chocolates?
Founded in 1915 and still owned by the founding family, which makes it Australia’s oldest family-owned chocolate maker. Everything is still manufactured in South Australia.
What should I buy at Haigh’s?
Chocolate frogs are the signature and the best souvenir. Beyond those: peppermint and violet creams, rocky road, chocolate-coated liquorice, the dark blocks, and the Easter Bilby in season.
Why does Haigh’s sell an Easter Bilby instead of a bunny?
Rabbits are a destructive introduced pest in Australia and the greater bilby is a threatened native marsupial. Haigh’s replaced its chocolate bunnies with bilbies in the 1990s, with proceeds supporting bilby conservation.
Can you see chocolate being made at Haigh’s?
Sometimes. The Visitor Centre has viewing into production areas, but it is a working factory and what is running varies by day. The guided experience covers the process regardless, with tastings.
Is Haigh’s chocolate expensive?
It is premium rather than luxury — well above supermarket chocolate, below imported European luxury brands. A small gift box is A$20-35 and a bag of frogs is the cheap, reliable gift.
Related Adelaide Guides
- Adelaide Central Market — the city’s best food hour, ten minutes away.
- Shopping in Adelaide — Rundle Mall, the arcades and what is worth buying.
- Adelaide Food Tours — chocolate alongside cheese, smallgoods and wine.
- Adelaide with Kids — the free tour is a good rainy-day booking.
- Rainy Day Activities — where else to go when the weather turns.
- Hahndorf Day Trip — Hills chocolate, fudge and German bakeries.
- History of Adelaide — the city Haigh’s grew up in.
- Things to Do in Adelaide — the wider list.
Photo Credits
The Adelaide Arcade on Rundle Mall: “Adelaide Arcade 2014.jpg” by Bahudhara, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Cocoa beans and chocolate: “Cocoa beans and its derivatives.jpg” by Mauro Cateb, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
