Guestling Bradshaw CE Primary School

The Aztecs loved their ‘chocolatl’, a luxury drink described as ‘finely ground, soft, foamy, reddish, bitter with chilli water, aromatic flowers, vanilla and wild bee honey’. But who were they? The Aztecs were nomads who founded the great city of Tenochtitlan in 1325. Creating a powerful and wealthy empire they conquered the whole of Mexico, but it was too dry to grow cocoa trees in Tenochtitlan, so the Aztecs had to get their cocoa beans from taxes (‘tributes’), or by trade. Tributes were given by provinces that the Aztecs had defeated in war

Many gods were worshipped by the Aztecs, and cocoa beans were linked to one in particular, a scary-sounding feathered serpent god of agriculture and creation called Quetzalcoatl. They built enormous temples to him and his biggest fan was their ruler, Moctezuma, Emperor of Mexico. The Aztecs were always convinced they were on the brink of terrible catastrophe, so they made human sacrifices to try and make the gods happy. Lots of people must have died this way, but at least they got to drink chocolate first!

An old Mexican Indian myth tells of how Quetzalcoatl was forced to leave the country, but left behind the cocoa tree, that he had brought as a gift from the gods. Apparently when Hernan Cortés arrived in the country in 1517, they may have thought he was Quetzalcoatl come back to visit them. 

Hernan Cortés was a Spanish conquistador sent on an expedition to colonise Mexico. With 11 ships and 600 men, he landed on the Mexican coast and travelled to Tenochtitlan to meet Moctezuma, ruler of the rich and prosperous Aztecs. Cortés hadn’t exactly come in peace – but Moctezuma welcomed him anyway, possibly because he thought it was best to get to know the Spanish in order to defeat them later. Moctezuma gave Cortés ‘chocolatl’, his favourite drink, served in a golden goblet.

Hernán Cortés was the first European to realise cocoa beans were valuable, but actually someone had brought them back before him. Christopher Columbus stole some from a Mayan trader and brought them over between 1502 and 1504. He guessed they were worth something, but didn’t understand what they were or what to do with them.

Cortés knew better, and brought them to Spain in 1528. Because cocoa beans were in short supply, chocolate was top secret in Spain for 100 years and the only people allowed to process cocoa beans were monks. They added cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar – leaving out the chilli that the Aztecs liked – and realised it was nicer served warm.

The rest of Europe was still in the dark. English and Dutch sailors had found cocoa beans in captured Spanish ‘treasure’ ships coming back from the New World, but they didn’t know what they were and threw them overboard, angry that they’d wasted their time. Some of them even thought they were sheep’s droppings!

But eventually word got out. An Italian traveller, Francesco Carletti, visited Central America and saw the drink being made and by 1606 chocolate was in Italy. It reached France in 1615 when Anne, daughter of Philip II of Spain, married King Louis XIII of France.

The French Court loved the new drink of chocolate, believing it was exotic, nourishing and good for your health. Cocoa plantations were set up in Cuba and Haiti in 1684, so in France it became much easier to get your hands on the sought-after cocoa beans.

Next it was the turn of the Dutch, who captured Curacao, an island off Venezuela, in 1634 and brought cocoa beans back to Holland. Chocolate probably reached Germany in 1646, brought back by visitors to Italy. And then finally it reached England in the 1650s…

Chocolate arrived in England in the 1650s and the aromatic drink became hugely popular in King Charles II’s court. But you’d have to be rich to drink it – high import duties on cocoa beans meant that it was expensive.

Gradually it started to become more widely available. In 1657 London’s very first Chocolate House was advertised: ‘In Bishopsgate Street, in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West Indian drink called Chocolate to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time and also unmade at reasonable rates.’

‘Went to Mr Bland's and there drank my morning draft in good Chocolatte.’

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 3 May 1664

Soon there were many chocolate houses in London, and like the cafés and coffee shops of today, people went to meet their friends and chat (or gossip) about the issues of the day over a cup of chocolate. The most famous one was White's Chocolate House in fashionable St James Street, opened in 1693 by an Italian, Frances White. The rich and bitter chocolate drinks were sold alongside ale, beer, snacks and coffee and would have been made from blocks of solid cocoa, probably imported from Spain. You could also buy a pressed cake to make chocolate at home. White’s still exists, but you can’t buy chocolate there now. Like many of the 18th century chocolate houses, it became an exclusive gentleman’s club, and still is to this day.

In 1687 an English doctor, Sir Hans Sloane was travelling in Jamaica where he tried chocolate, a local drink. He didn’t like it much, but when he added milk to it, he thought it tasted much better. He brought his milk chocolate recipe back to England, where it was sold as a medicine. The Cadbury Brothers later used his recipe for the milk chocolate drink they produced between 1849 and 1875.

Chocolate was getting more and more popular, and to meet the new demand, cocoa plantations were built in the West Indies, the Far East and Africa. As a result the price of cocoa beans gradually fell – good news for people who wanted to try chocolate who previously could not afford it…

The high import duties on cocoa were reduced in 1853 by Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone. Transport had become easier too, due to the Industrial Revolution. It meant that now chocolate was available to a large percentage of the population. With people clamouring for chocolate, interest grew in how it was made.

Some of the earliest cocoa makers, like Fry’s of Bristol and Terry’s of York, were apothecaries or chemists, who considered it a kind of medicine. They also had the equipment and skills to heat, measure and blend the ingredients. Other cocoa manufacturers began as grocers – like John Cadbury, who started out in 1824 dealing in tea and coffee in his Birmingham shop, and Rowntree's of York, which branched out from the family grocery business. It was all still about a chocolate drink though – a solid chocolate bar was not invented until Victorian times.

Drinking chocolate - it seems so simple, but it actually took all sorts of tinkering to come up with the drinking chocolate we know and love today. Because there was so much cocoa butter in the cocoa – a whopping 50% or more – manufacturers at the time had to add things to it, like potato flour and sago (a type of starch), to try and absorb the fat and mask the taste. Some ruthless manufacturers even added brick dust and even poisonous red lead to their products.

John Cadbury opened a grocer’s shop in Bull Street, Birmingham in 1824. He sold tea and coffee, but experimented with cocoa and drinking chocolate too. It really was a hands-on business, breaking up the cocoa beans with a pestle and mortar and adding common contemporary ingredients such as treacle and starches. By 1831 John Cadbury’s cocoa and drinking chocolate was getting more and more popular. So he rented a small factory in Crooked Lane not far from his shop and became a 'manufacturer of drinking chocolate and cocoa'. It was the start of Cadbury as we know it today.

A price list from 1842 shows that John Cadbury sold eleven sorts of cocoa, and sixteen different lines of drinking chocolate – some as a pressed block, some as a powder. Customers would scrape a little off the block and mix it with hot milk or water. John Cadbury introduced a solid chocolate in 1849 – but it wouldn’t have been like the chocolate we know today. Then something happened which was to change Cadbury forever. In 1866 John’s son George brought back a cocoa press from Holland. It had been made by Coenradd Johannes van Houten, a manufacturer who’d been looking for a way of reducing cocoa’s high fat content – and his van Houten press did just that.

With some of the cocoa butter removed, suddenly cocoa and drinking chocolate was much tastier. Flour was no longer needed, and Cadbury launched a new product ‘Cocoa Essence’, advertised as ‘Absolutely pure, therefore Best’. But what about the cocoa butter left over? Surely there must be something you could do with it…

Who was the very first person to make ‘eating chocolate’? 18th century France produced pastilles and bars, but it wasn’t until Bristol company Fry & Son made a ‘chocolate delicieux a manger’ in 1847 that the first bar of chocolate as we know it today appeared. It was a mixture of cocoa powder and sugar with a little of the melted cocoa butter that had been extracted from the beans. The result was a bar that could be moulded. It might have been coarse and bitter by today’s standards, but it was still a revolution. Moulded into blocks and bars, and poured over fruit-flavoured centres, this plain chocolate was a real breakthrough. But there was more to follow.

In 1875, a Swiss manufacturer called Daniel Peter added powdered milk to make the first milk chocolate bar. It wasn’t a completely new idea – Cadbury produced their milk chocolate drink based on Sir Hans Sloane’s recipe between 1849 and 1875.  And Cadbury added their own milk chocolate bars in 1897. Cadbury Milk Chocolate in 1897 was a very coarse, dry eating chocolate, made by blending milk powder with cocoa, cocoa butter and sugar.

But Daniel Peter was still way ahead of them – using condensed milk rather than powdered milk to produce a chocolate with a superior taste and texture. Another Swiss manufacturer had invented the conching machine in 1879. This refined chocolate, giving it the smooth texture we know today.

Swiss milk chocolate dominated the British market – a situation the Cadbury family set out to challenge in the 20th Century.

In 1905 Cadbury launched the world-famous Dairy Milk bar – and it’s still going strong over 100 years later. But what else has happened?

Swiss confectioner Jules Sechaud invented a machine for making filled chocolates in Montreux in 1913. Boxes of chocolates stopped being so expensive and this made it available to the general population.

Cadbury bought Fry’s in 1919 and the company grew, producing chocolate on an industrial scale that could be enjoyed by everyone. Other big manufacturers appeared: Mars and Hershey in America, Nestlé and Lindt in Switzerland, Rowntree in the UK. Cadbury and other manufacturers started making ‘Countlines’ – bars with other ingredients like nougat, wafer and honeycomb, covered in chocolate – think of Crunchie and Double Decker.

During the Second World War, different manufacturers worked together, so for instance if a huge Government order came in that couldn’t be filled, Nestlé would make a Cadbury’s bar or vice versa. Cadbury Dairy Milk disappeared during the war years, because there was no fresh milk available – instead there was Ration Chocolate made with powdered milk. It was 15 years before rationing ended and manufacturers could return back to normal.

Throughout the 20th century there was fierce competition – chocolate had become a huge business, and details of new bars were kept top secret to stop rivals copying them! These days there are thousands of types of chocolate to choose from – you can drink it, eat it, spread it on a sandwich, pour it on your ice cream or make cocktails with it.

There’s also a growing interest in organic cocoa and wellbeing. The World Cocoa Foundation was founded in 2000 by a group of manufacturers including Cadbury, in order to safeguard the interests of cocoa farmers around the world. An example of Cadbury’s continued support for cocoa farmers is through the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership. Cadbury is providing millions of pounds worth of investment to help boost crops and make the lives of cocoa farmers better – it’s both a link back to the Cadbury family’s principles and a way of guaranteeing the supply of cocoa for future chocolate lovers.