In a millennium and a half, chocolate has changed from a sacred Mayan brew into an everyday candy bar – all the while remaining one of our best-loved foods. Check out these high points of chocolate history.
600 A.D. – Mayans discover cacao trees in South American rain forest, making the beans into a bitter chocolate drink seasoned with spices.
1400s – Mayans and Aztecs use cacao beans as coins. Both societies savor the sacred chocolate brew. Aztecs believe cacao comes from their god Quetzalcoatl, and that drinking it brings wisdom and virility. King Montezuma drinks 100 cups of cocoa a day from a gold goblet.
1500s – Explorers Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortez bring cacao seeds home to Spain, doctoring the bitter drink with cinnamon and sugar. Hot cocoa is born.
1600s – Fashionable chocolate houses open. Spanish cocoa becomes a craze for the wealthy and royal throughout Europe. Well-heeled ladies sip it for breakfast in bed. Colonial plantations, staffed largely with slave labor, crop up to supply Europeans with cacao and sugar.
1828 – The first chocolate bar as we know it bursts on the scene when Dutch chocolatier Conrad van Houten invents the cocoa press. As chocolate transforms itself from drink to food, the public gets its first taste.
1875 – Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter invents the milk chocolate bar by adding Henri Nestlé’s condensed milk to his chocolate mix.
1894 – American caramel maker Milton Hershey produces his first chocolate bars, using chocolate-making machines he saw at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Today – Machines process chocolate, at great speed, but, cacao farming remains a labor-intensive industry. Cacao plantations thrive in tropical rain forests, mainly in West Africa.
