COLUMBUS, Ohio - Visitors to this year's Ohio State Fair have a chance to see a one-ton sculpture made out of butter.

The American Dairy Association Mideast has unveiled artists depictions of a traditional butter cow and calf joined by a larger-than-life bottle of chocolate milk, along with four high school athletes.

The work, which took an estimated 500 hours to complete, is a salute to chocolate milk, the official beverage of Ohio High School Athletic Association.

The six-foot bottle of chocolate milk featured in the butter display gets its creamy, chocolatey color from cocoa powder that’s mixed with the butter. It’s the first time the sculptors have ever added color to their masterpiece.

The sculptors begin by welding steel frames to support the weight of the butter. From 55-pound blocks, the butter is sliced into manageable loaves and layered on the frames. After many hours of molding and smoothing the butter, each sculpture begins to take shape. Fine details are added last.

The 2017 display was crafted by a group of five Ohio-based technical sculptors including lead sculptors Paul Brooke and Alex Balz of Cincinnati, Tammy Buerk of West Chester, Erin Swearingen of Columbus and Matt Davidson, a dairy farmer from Sidney.

“We wanted the sculpture to really look like a delicious bottle of chocolate milk, so we decided to test out a small batch of butter by adding a pinch of cocoa powder,” says one of the lead butter sculptors, Alex Balz. “It created this beautiful brown color that looked perfect when we applied it to the sculpture.”

The butter sculptures are on display in the Dairy Products Building at the Ohio State Fair from 9 am until 9 pm each day.