How Chocolate Went From Bitter Drink to Craft Bar

For most of its history, chocolate was a drink, and not a sweet one. Pre-Columbian cacao drinks were often bitter, flavored with spices, flowers and sometimes chile, and frothed by pouring from one vessel into another. The Maya buried their painted chocolate vessels in elite tombs. The solid, sweet bar is a nineteenth-century invention, and the small bean-to-bar maker is a recent one.

The tree and the first drinkers

Theobroma cacao is native to Mexico, Central America and northern South America, and its flowers grow straight from the trunk and branches. Each pod holds twenty to sixty seeds in a pulp that can be eaten raw. The archaeologist John Henderson thinks the earliest cacao drinkers likely made a simpler drink by fermenting the pulp, rather than the seeds. Fermentation is still a necessary step in making chocolate, after the pods are harvested and before the seeds are dried and toasted. Chemical traces of cacao have been found on pottery in southern Mexico from as early as 1900 BC, in Honduras from at least 1100 BC, and on vessels from the upper Amazon of Ecuador roughly 5,300 years old, which researchers describe as the oldest center of cacao domestication yet identified.

The Maya cup

By the Classic Maya period, cacao had its own written word, kakaw, spelled in hieroglyphs with the head, body or fin of a fish. The glyph appears most often on cylinder vessels from the Late Classic period, 600 to 900 CE. In vessels from an Early Classic tomb at Río Azul, in Guatemala, residues tested positive for theobromine and caffeine, and hieroglyphs on one of them are believed to spell the word for cacao. The Maya drank it sometimes mixed with corn and flavored with spices and flowers, and also ate it as a sauce on corn tamales. A painted vase in the Princeton University Art Museum shows a woman pouring chocolate from one vessel into another to froth it.

Cacao as currency

The Aztecs took cacao as tribute from Soconusco, a cacao-growing region in southern Mexico, and the beans served as money as well as the drink of the elite. A price list from Tlaxcala in 1545 gives a good turkey hen at a hundred beans, a turkey egg at three and a ripe avocado at one. A Nahuatl text describes chocolate in earlier times as precious and rare, drunk by rulers or great warriors; commoners and the poor did not drink it.

Spain adds sugar

By 1544 cacao and chocolate had reached the Spanish court. In Europe the drink went through one important change: sugar took the place of chile. London's first chocolate house opened in 1657, and chocolate there remained a drink for the elite. Mexican-style drinking chocolate, which some makers still grind on traditional stone mills called molinos, carries on the drinking tradition (see the hot chocolate vs drinking chocolate guide).

The Dutch press, 1828

In 1828 the Dutch chocolate maker van Houten patented an inexpensive method for pressing the fat from roasted cacao beans, using hydraulic pressure to make chocolate powder. Treated with alkaline salts, the powder mixed more easily with water, a process now called Dutching. Cocoa powder made chocolate drinks much easier to prepare, and it made it possible to combine chocolate with sugar and cocoa butter to form a solid.

The bar, 1840s to 1879

In the late 1840s the English chocolate makers Fry produced what is arguably the first eating chocolate bar. One history dates it to 1847, another to 1849. In 1875 Daniel Peter of Vevey, Switzerland, working with condensed milk supplied by his neighbor Henri Nestlé's company, developed milk chocolate. Nestlé credits him with solving the problem of adding milk to cocoa and with the first milk chocolate bar. In 1879 Rodolphe Lindt, also Swiss, developed conching, heating and rolling chocolate in a machine until it is smooth. By company lore, a machine was left running over a weekend, and Lindt came back three days later to melting chocolate. In about thirty years chocolate had gained a solid, smooth form alongside the drink.

The bean-to-bar makers

Bean-to-bar chocolate is made by a single maker who controls the entire process, from the raw cacao bean to the finished bar (the bean-to-bar chocolate guide explains the steps). In Orem, Utah, Art Pollard and fellow BYU graduate David Goble founded Amano Artisan Chocolate, whose bars have been sold since 2006 (the Amano producer guide tells that story). Dandelion Chocolate, founded by Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, began in early 2010 as a bean-to-bar factory in the Mission District of San Francisco (the Dandelion Chocolate producer guide). The same year, Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor, whose background is woodworking and boat building, bought small-scale equipment and began making chocolate. Their small factory is in Eureka, California (the Dick Taylor producer guide).

In Europe, Mikkel Friis-Holm, a Danish chef who met the newly started Scharffen Berger in San Francisco in the late 1990s, got involved with a cacao project in Nicaragua in 2007 and set out to make the whole product himself, from bean to bar. The first Danish-made Friis-Holm chocolate ran through the machines in 2015. His Nicaraguan Chuno bar is one example of that work (shop Friis-Holm Chuno Triple Turned). A single-origin bar comes from cacao grown in one defined place, a country, a region or a single estate (the single-origin vs blended chocolate guide). The single-origin chocolate tasting guide covers how to taste one.

A timeline from pod to bar

Read top to bottom, the table shows how short the bar's stretch is. Measured against the 5,300 years since the Ecuadorian vessels, the eating bar, about 180 years old, covers less than 4 percent of the time for which there is evidence of people using cacao. Above the Fry row, chocolate is almost always a drink.

What the history explains about a bar today

Many bean-to-bar chocolates list just two ingredients, cacao and sugar: in effect the sweetened drink of the Spanish court, set into solid form by the nineteenth century's press and conche. For a wider map of makers, the complete craft chocolate guide is the place to start. Drinking chocolate is the original form. Dandelion House Hot Chocolate (shop Dandelion House Hot Chocolate) and Ocelot Blood Orange Drinking Chocolate (shop Ocelot Blood Orange Drinking Chocolate) are both made for the cup rather than the bar.

Warm the milk and whisk until it foams. That part of the recipe is a few thousand years old.

Sources & Further Reading

• Zarrillo et al., The Use and Domestication of Theobroma cacao during the Mid-Holocene in the Upper Amazon (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2018)
• Powis et al., Oldest chocolate in the New World (Antiquity)
• UC Berkeley: earliest cacao beverages at Puerto Escondido, Honduras
• Cornell Chronicle: In search of wine, ancients become earliest chocoholics
• LACMA Unframed: Maya chocolate vessels and the kakaw glyph
• Princeton University Art Museum: the Princeton Vase
• Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute: cacao residues in Maya vessels from Río Azul
• Ancient Mesoamerica: words for cacao preparation on a Río Azul vessel
• Cornell University Library, Chocolate: Food of the Gods: When Money Grew on Trees
• Online Nahuatl Dictionary: cacahuatl
• National Parks Board Singapore, Flora and Fauna Web: Theobroma cacao
• The New York Review of Books: review of Sophie and Michael Coe, The True History of Chocolate
• Exploratorium: the history of chocolate in Europe
• CAOBISCO: Short history of chocolate
• Nestlé: company history timeline
• Lindt & Sprüngli: history
• International Cocoa Organization: FAQ
• BYU Magazine: From Bean to Bar
• Dandelion Chocolate: media kit
• Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate: about us
• Friis-Holm Chokolade: om os (about us)