Published: 21 September 2026
For millions of people, Easter wouldn't quite feel like Easter without one familiar sight. A little chocolate bunny wrapped in shining gold foil, tied with a red ribbon and finished with a tiny bell.
Now one of the world’s most recognisable Easter chocolates, the Lindt Gold Bunny has a surprisingly sweet story behind its creation, one that began in 1952 with a little girl, a real rabbit and an inspired Lindt Master Chocolatier.
Let’s start at the beginning, with a brief history of the Lindt brand.
Lindt is actually Lindt & Sprüngli AG. It was created in 1899 out of a merger between top-class chocolate maker Lindt and famous confectioners Sprüngli & Son. The Lindt Company was famous for the invention of the ‘long conche’. This was a machine which stirred chocolate continually, thus producing a much finer consistency and also letting undesired aromas evaporate into the air.
Lindt was also one of the first chocolate makers to add cocoa butter back into the chocolate mass and his long conche made sure that it was distributed evenly throughout the liquid chocolate. These two procedures turned chocolate from something hard, chewy and quite difficult to eat into the melt-in-the-mouth, smooth and delicious product we know today.
This laid the foundations for Sprungli to turn a tasty treat into an art form.
Lindt has always been a premium brand and as such it has always paid a great deal of attention to presentation. Even its standard bars are packaged to highlight their quality and really have a presence on a shelf.
When Lindt produces special items for special occasions, you can be sure that they will be as gorgeous to the eye as they are to the mouth, and nothing demonstrates this better than the famous Lindt gold bunny.
The story goes that back to 1952 when one of the Lindt Maîtres Chocolatiers, and hisdaughter. As the family was having a traditional Easter brunch, the girl spotted a bunny outside, she was delighted to watch it hopping about and asked if she could go out to it, but as she got to the door, the bunny ran away, leaving her devastated.
Thinking about how he could cheer her up, her father decided to craft a rabbit out of Lindt’s finest milk chocolate, using a conching machine to melt down the chocolate until it was smooth enough to pour into moulds of any shape. Wrapping it in gold foil alongside a red ribbon and small gold bell around its neck, it became a yearly family tradition to hunt for her gold bunny in the garden.
The bunnies became a hit in Germany, later spreading to Switzerland and Austria in 1994, and by 1997 they had reached Britain, the US and Australia.
Now, over half a century later, the Lindt gold bunny has become one of the classic symbols of Easter and its arrival is as eagerly awaited by adults as it is by children.
Roughly 150 million gold Lindt bunnies are made each year and sold in over 50 countries around the world. That means an average of around 410,000 bunnies are produced every day! With millions of bunnies being made each year, Easter is a very busy time for chocolate manufacturers.
Over recent years, there has been increasing concern over the plight of small-scale cocoa farmers, who are the backbone of the chocolate industry. Lindt has moved to address this through both commercial and charitable initiatives. The commercial initiative is the Lindt & Sprüngli Farming Programme.
This programme has been operating since 2008. It pays a price premium for the cocoa beans used in Lindt chocolate and this extra money helps make it possible for farmers to apply good agricultural, social, environmental and business practices to their production process and also provides funds to develop rural infrastructure.
The charitable initiative is the Lindt Cocoa Foundation. This was founded in 2013 and aims to promote social and ecological sustainability right from the very starting point of the chocolate production chain.
If you would like to find out more about our Lindt products, browse our range of Lindt easter chocolate and Lindt advent calendars or contact our team today who are happy to help!
