Cold Stone Creamery - Columbus locations, Pickerington

From behind a frozen granite slab, the staff of Cold Stone Creamery uses twin spatulas to blend custom servings of ice cream and creative mix-ins to fit customers’ exact specifications. Founded by Donald and Susan Sutherland in 1988, Cold Stone began under the hot Arizona sun, eventually spreading its frosty fingers to encompass more than 1,400 locations worldwide. Despite the size of the company, each location’s staff keeps up the handcrafted quality, making ice cream onsite every day and using those signature spatulas to create delicious pointillist art against the freezer wall.

Meanwhile, the sweets at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory taste all the sweeter after witnessing the hard and delicate work that goes into their creation. During engaging visits, staffers entertain guests by hand-dipping crisp apples into burbling vats of caramel or fashioning silky bricks of fudge atop traditional marble slabs. They don't just tease the eyes, though. They also treat tongues to free samples, and even lead chocolate-tasting classes in which they provide mint- and sea-salt-infused samples of chocolate from around the world.

In addition to tastings, chocolate-making classes encourage customer participation, with instructors offering up the fresh ingredients stored on site to students who wish to learn the fine art of chocolate making. During these classes, they walk guests through the delicate process of making clusters infused with nuts or fruit, or melting milk or dark chocolate to fill a mold.