The History of Chocolate & Ethical Chocolate Production (#158)

It’s safe to say that most people like chocolate in some form. Whether you like milk, dark, white, crazy flavours, drinking hot chocolate, or maybe even adding it to your chilli or other savoury meals, chocolate as we know it comes in many different forms and has all sorts of uses. But how much do you know about the history of chocolate?

From its creation from the beans of the cacao tree, it can be traced to the ancient Maya, and even earlier to the ancient Olmecs of southern Mexico. The confections of today bear little resemblance to the chocolate of the past: throughout much of its history, chocolate was a bitter beverage, not a sweet treat. But after it became popular in the courts of Europe and the streets of colonial America, chocolate soon evolved into the universally loved commodity it is today.

So let’s take a look back at the history of chocolate, and to do that, we need to start at least 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

For a bit of context, a quick note about how chocolate is made: chocolate is made from the fruit of cacao trees, which are native to Central and South America. The fruits are called pods and each pod contains around 40 cacao beans. The beans are dried and roasted to create cocoa beans.

It’s unclear exactly when cacao came on the scene or who invented it, but it is believed that its history began in ancient Mesoamerica, present day Mexico, 4,000 years ago, or even earlier — archaeologists have discovered the earliest traces of cacao in pottery used by the ancient Mayo-Chinchipe culture 5,300 years ago in the upper Amazon region of Ecuador.

But the Olmec, one of the earliest civilizations in Latin America, were possibly the first to turn the cacao plant into chocolate. According to Hayes Lavis, cultural arts curator for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, ancient Olmec pots and vessels from around 1500 B.C. were discovered with traces of theobromine, the stimulant compound found in chocolate and tea. It’s thought the Olmecs used cacao to create a ceremonial drink. However, since they kept no written history, opinions differ on if they used cacao beans in their concoctions or just the pulp of the cacao pod.

The Olmecs undoubtedly passed their cacao knowledge on to the Central American Maya who not only consumed chocolate, they revered it. The Mayan written history mentions chocolate drinks being used in celebrations and to finalise important transactions and ceremonies.

Despite chocolate’s importance in Mayan culture, it wasn’t reserved for the wealthy and powerful, but was readily available to almost everyone. In many Mayan households, chocolate was enjoyed with every meal. Mayan chocolate was thick and frothy and often combined with chilli peppers, honey or water.

This then carried on to the Aztecs. They believed cacao was given to them by their gods. Like the Mayans, they drank it flavoured with chilli, maize and fruit during religious ceremonies and on festive occasions. Its therapeutic properties were also well-known: cacao was considered to be fortifying and an aphrodisiac, while also being used to treat burns and injuries. They also used cacao beans as currency to buy food and other goods. In Aztec culture, cacao beans were considered more valuable than gold.

Compared to Mayan culture where chocolate was available to everyone, Aztec chocolate, which they called xocolatl, was mostly an upper-class extravagance, although the lower classes enjoyed it occasionally at weddings or other celebrations. Perhaps the most notorious Aztec chocolate lover of all was the Aztec ruler Montezuma II who allegedly drank gallons of xocolatl each day for energy and as an aphrodisiac. It’s also said he reserved some of his cacao beans for his military.

There are conflicting reports about when chocolate arrived in Europe, although it’s agreed it first arrived in Spain. One story says Christopher Columbus discovered cacao beans after intercepting a trade ship on a journey to America and brought the beans back to Spain with him in 1502. Another tale states Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés was introduced to chocolate by the Aztecs of Montezuma’s court.

The legend says that when Cortés and his men landed in Mexico in 1519 looking for gold and riches, they discovered a strange looking drink. Cortés realised the benefits he could reap with this “new” drink and returned to Spain in 1528 with some cocoa beans and the equipment needed for its preparation.

Drinking chocolate received a mixed reception at the court of Charles I of Spain and it took a few more decades before it was really accepted. This was helped by the fact that, in the meantime, a group of nuns, doing missionary work in Mexico, had the ingenious idea of sweetening it with sugar.

No matter how chocolate got to Spain, by the late 1500s it was a much-loved indulgence by the Spanish court. By the end of the century, hot chocolate had become a highly-prized beverage in Spain, and it was consumed everywhere at any time of day.

The Spanish kept chocolate quiet for a very long time. It was nearly a century before it reached neighbouring France, and then the rest of Europe. In 1615, French King Louis XIII married Anne of Austria, daughter of Spanish King Phillip III. It’s believed that to celebrate the union, she brought samples of chocolate to the royal courts of France. Soon, chocolate mania spread throughout Europe.

But European palates weren’t satisfied with the traditional Aztec chocolate drink recipe. They made their own varieties of hot chocolate with cane sugar, cinnamon and other common spices and flavourings. Soon, fashionable chocolate houses for the wealthy cropped up throughout London, Amsterdam and other European cities. The high demand for chocolate brought along chocolate plantations, which were worked by thousands of enslaved people.

As the craze for chocolate spread throughout the 17th century, people were fascinated by this new drink. It swept the aristocracy and the clergy off their feet. Chocolate was more expensive than tea or coffee and remained a luxury product for a long time. This meant it became very fashionable among the privileged classes and was savoured for breakfast, enjoyed throughout the day or offered as refreshment during society events and informally between friends. Its reputation as an Aztec aphrodisiac persisted and many people associated chocolate with pleasure, so much so that for a long time, it was considered appropriate for adults only.

This new drink was the subject of a lot of discussion and debate. The church was keen to establish whether it was food or a drink and consequently whether it could be consumed during Lent and would not break the fasting. Medical opinion also varied—for some doctors, chocolate was harmful and upset digestion. Most, however, praised its remedial properties and recommended it for stomach aches, digestion, coughs, fever and dizziness. It could be enjoyed at the end of the meal, like coffee or tea.

Also in the 17th century, chocolate spread to the American colonies. Cacao arrived in Florida on a Spanish ship in 1641, and it’s thought the first American chocolate house opened in Boston in 1682. By 1773, cocoa beans were a major American colony import and chocolate was enjoyed by people of all classes. During the Revolutionary War, chocolate was provided to the military as rations and sometimes given to soldiers as payment instead of money.

Now we get to the 1800s, and big leaps were being made in the technology that brought chocolate closer to what it is today, thanks to the Industrial Revolution. In 1828, Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten discovered a way to treat cacao beans with alkaline salts to make a powdered chocolate that was easier to mix with water. The process became known as “Dutch processing”, and it produced cacao powder or “Dutch cocoa.”

Van Houten supposedly also invented the cocoa press, although some reports state it was invented by his father. The cocoa press separated cocoa butter from roasted cocoa beans to inexpensively and easily make cocoa powder, which was used to create a wide variety of chocolate products. Both Dutch processing and the chocolate press helped make chocolate affordable for everyone. It also opened the door for chocolate to be mass-produced.

For much of the 19th century, chocolate was still being enjoyed as a beverage, and milk was often added instead of water. More inventors and chocolatiers started experimenting with what chocolate could become, and from here, there are some names you might recognise.

In 1847, British chocolatier J. S. Fry and Sons created the first chocolate bar moulded from a paste made of sugar, chocolate liquor and cocoa butter. Rival chocolatier Cadbury, credited with pioneering the Valentine’s Day chocolate box and chocolate Easter egg, followed suit soon after and in 1854 earned a royal warrant as purveyors of chocolate to Queen Victoria.

It was in Switzerland that chocolate production took one of its greatest leaps forward. Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter is generally credited for adding dried milk powder to chocolate to create milk chocolate in 1876. This dried milk powder was developed a few years earlier by Henri Nestlé, and a few years after Peter created his milk chocolate, he and Nestlé worked together to form the Nestlé Company, bringing milk chocolate to the mass market.

Chocolate had come a long way during the 19th century, but it was still hard and difficult to chew. In 1879, another Swiss chocolatier, Rudolf Lindt, invented the chocolate conching machine which mixed and aerated chocolate, giving it a smooth, melt-in-your-mouth consistency that blended well with other ingredients.

In the United States, Milton Hershey pioneered the assembly-line production of milk chocolate. After selling his caramel candy company for $1 million and producing his first milk chocolate bar in 1900, Hershey bought farmland near his birthplace in rural Pennsylvania and built an entire factory town devoted to chocolate.

By this time, more family chocolate companies were mass-producing a variety of chocolate confections to meet the growing demand. Chocolate bars soared in popularity during the Roaring Twenties. By the end of the decade, more than 40,000 different candy bars were being made in the US. Father-and-son duo Frank C. Mars and Forrest Mars Sr. collaborated on the idea for the Milky Way bar, which hit the market in 1923 with the chocolate for its coating supplied by Hershey’s. The family-owned business would rival Hershey’s, and Forrest Mars Sr. later partnered with the son of a Hershey’s executive to begin production of M&Ms in 1941.

Another candy company owned by H. B. Reese, who had worked as a dairy farmer and shipping foreman for Hershey’s, was launched in 1923 and five years later introduced Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They later came to be produced by Hershey’s, and became one of the top-selling candies in the US.

Today, most modern chocolate is highly-refined and mass-produced, although some chocolatiers still make their chocolate creations by hand and keep the ingredients as pure as possible, which we obviously see in the more expensive prices of the more luxury, hand-crafted products. Chocolate is obviously still available to drink, but is more often enjoyed as an edible confection or in desserts and baked goods.

I do wonder what the Olmecs, the Mayans and the Aztecs would think of our chocolate products today, and whether they would like them or if our European palettes have made them far too sweet and sickly compared to the bitter taste they would have been used to.

Ethical Chocolate Production

I want to end this episode by talking a little bit about ethical chocolate production. I did mention earlier about chocolate plantations that were run by thousands of slaves. As with a lot of things we have today, chocolate does have a colonial past that took advantage of so many people. But slavery isn’t just a thing of the past — even today, modern-day chocolate production comes at a cost.

Whilst Fry & Sons and Cadbury’s took a paternalistic approach to their employees on home soil (for example, Cadbury’s built a dedicated village in the Birmingham suburb of Bournville to house their workers), there is an undeniably dark side to the production of chocolate.

During the 16th century, the Spanish were quick to harness the labour of the indigenous people of the Americas. Disease and maltreatment of the local people had a catastrophic impact on the native population. It is estimated that only 10% of the original population of the Americas were still alive by the end of the 17th century. The answer was, of course, not to stop this awful treatment, but to import more slaves from the African continent to work on the cacao plantations. Thousands of Africans were shipped to the Caribbean and the Americas as part of the ‘Three Way Trade’ system, which saw human cargo being sold and exchanged for raw materials like cacao beans and cotton which would be shipped back to Europe and processed by industry into chocolate and textiles.

The discovery of forastero cacao, a lower quality but more productive form of the cacao bean from Ecuador, would see dramatic changes in how chocolate was produced. An enslaved workforce and higher yields meant chocolate could be produced more cost effectively. In the early 19th century, the Portuguese began transplanting forastero cuttings to their colonies in Africa. By the early 20th century, cacao plantations were widely established in Nigeria, the Gold Cost and the Ivory Coast. For many years, Fry & Sons boycotted cacao beans from Portuguese West African plantations in protest against the poor working conditions endured by the workers.

Even today, as many cocoa farmers struggle to make ends meet, some turn to low-wage workers or slavery (sometimes acquired through child trafficking) to stay competitive. To expand cacao plantations, many companies are destroying rainforests, particularly in West Africa.

So what is being done about this? In more recent times, this has prompted grassroots efforts for large chocolate companies to reconsider how they get their cocoa supply and its environmental impact. It’s also resulted in appeals for more fair-trade chocolate which is created in a more ethical and sustainable way.

One of the biggest organisations doing this is the World Cocoa Foundation, a non-profit international membership organisation whose vision is a thriving and sustainable cocoa sector, where farmers prosper, communities are empowered, and the planet is healthy. They say that to secure the future of chocolate and ensure that it’s available for generations to come, it’s essential that sustainable farming practices and ethical means of production are implemented in the cocoa supply chain.

According to their website, their long-term goals are:

• Prosperous cocoa farmers become truly sustainable and profitable, with transformation of traditional smallholder farming into modern business that deliver sustainable livelihoods for farmers and their families;
• Empowered cocoa-growing communities lead their own development, human rights are protected, and safety and well-being of children and families are strengthened;
• A healthy planet is conserved and enhanced, with resilient and biodiverse landscapes in cocoa geographies, and the carbon footprint of the sector is reduced.

The WCF has teamed up with over 100 companies around the world to make the cocoa supply chain more sustainable. Among WCF’s members are farm-level input providers, financial institutions, cocoa processors, chocolate makers and manufacturers, cocoa trading companies, ports, warehousing companies, and retailers. They operate from six continents, representing 80% of the global cocoa and chocolate market.

There are lots of resources and information on their website if you want to learn more about each of their long-term goals and strategies, so I’ll put links to everything in the notes.

Fair Trade

Another term you’ve almost definitely heard is Fair Trade. Most consumers have an idea that Fair Trade products are probably a good choice, but maybe they’re not sure exactly why. And with 86% of millennials looking for responsibly sourced products, Fair Trade seems like a no brainer. But what exactly is Fair Trade?

The Fair Trade movement began in the 1950s when Europeans and Americans travelling to different countries observed that local artisans and farmers were struggling to cover the cost of their businesses. Most of these travellers would purchase some of those products and return to Europe or the US to sell them for a higher price, then bring the profits directly back to the artisans and farmers. 

But obviously, that process can be open to exploitation, without anyone actually able to confirm if the profits really went back to workers. So in the 1990s, when Fair Trade USA founder Paul Rice was working with coffee farmers in Nicaragua, he wanted to get involved in creating standards that could govern the way that Fair Trade was monitored across the globe. This was the foundation for what we now know as Fair Trade Certification.

Paul Rice returned to the US and founded Fair Trade USA in 1997, bringing the certification model to large companies who sold goods like cocoa, bananas and tea. They began to educate corporations on why it was important not only to sell more ethical products under Fair Trade terms but also to educate consumers by using the Fair Trade Seal on products to increase awareness.

Today, the certification process is complex and rigorous, generally taking anywhere between 6-9 months for a producer to achieve Fair Trade Certified status. There’s a great Forbes article that I’ll link in the notes that goes into this in a lot more depth, and the writer has interviewed experts to learn more. 

These are a few of the things the experts had to say about Fair Trade: Maya Spaull, VP of Apparel and Home Goods at Fair Trade USA, said that Fair Trade is “your guarantee that a product was traded in a more ethical way, which supports better working conditions, improves livelihoods and protects the environment.” And Jennifer Gootman, VP of Social Consciousness at West Elm, said, “It’s essential for brands to be making commitments, but on the other side we need consumers to be educated, be aware and make choices that reflect those values as well.”

You might also see Fair Trade written as one word, Fairtrade without the space, and be confused why they’re different. Fairtrade (as one word) is the trademark of the Fairtrade Foundation, which is based in the UK rather than the US. Fairtrade works with farmers and workers so they can improve their living standards, invest in their communities and businesses, and protect our shared environment.

They achieve this by rallying a global community of millions – farmers and workers, supply chain partners, brands, retailers, shoppers, schools, and the government – to pay fair prices and uphold fair production standards and practices. Again, there’s lots to learn about the Fairtrade Foundation, so I’ll link their website in the notes if you want to learn more about what they do, facts and figures, the impact of their work, and more.

So next time you’re buying chocolate or any products that contain it, as well as products that are farmed as a commodity like fruits, vegetables, tea and coffee, look out for whether they’re sustainably or ethically farmed. You can do this by looking out for a fairtrade mark. I’ll also put some great resources in the notes for info on how to spot if what you’re buying is fair trade and slave-free.

So that’s where I’m going to end this! I hope I haven’t overwhelmed you with information, but I couldn’t cover the history of chocolate without talking a bit about the ethical practices and the organisations that are trying to make chocolate production more sustainable, and living conditions better for farmers. As usual, I hope you’ve learned something new!