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600 AD - The cocoa bean is considered the ultimate status symbol in the Mayan and Aztec cultures. They use the beans as currency and those wealthy enough to have an excess of beans use them to make a chocolate drink that gives them "wisdom and power".
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1492 - Not only did Columbus sail the ocean blue, but brought cocoa beans back to Spain. He was the first European to discover cocoa and chocolate.
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1606 - Spain manages to keep the discovery of chocolate a secret for more than a century. Antonio Carletti, an Italian merchant, breaks the Spanish monopoly of the chocolate trade.
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1616 - A Spanish princess married Louis XIII of France and the secret got out. Chocolate spread from France to England, Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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Chocolate incites controversy as Johan Franciscus Rauch of Vienna condemns chocolate as inflamer of passions and urges monks not to drink it. He calls it “wash for hogs.” Only because he disliked chocolate himself!
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1657 - England's first chocolate house opens in London. It's a big hit with the upper class and soon becomes the place where the elite meet to sip.
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The first chocolate made by machine is produced in Barcelona, Spain.
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The first packaged box of Whitman's chocolate debuts thus being the advent of boxed chocolates as we know them today.
Whitman's is one of America's largest and oldest brands of boxed chocolates. Whitman's confections have been produced since 1842, originally by Stephen Whitman. The Whitman's Sampler, an assortment of boxed chocolates, is still popular. -
In the 1850s, Englishman Joseph Fry changed the chocolate tradition by adding more cocoa butter, rather than hot water, to cocoa powder and sugar. The world’s first solid chocolate was born.
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Richard Cadbury creates the first known heart-shaped chocolate box for Valentine’s Day.
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1876 - The Swiss Daniel Peter was trying to add milk to chocolate to produce a smoother chocolate. However, you can't add water to chocolate, it makes the chocolate shrink and separate and generally disintergrate. Milk has water in it. Daniel Peter met Henri Nestle'. Nestle' had perfected the manufacture of condensed milk , so and Peter added milk solids to chocolate and produced the world's first milk chocolate, as well as starting the Nestle' Company.
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1895 - Milton S. Hershey sells his first Hershey Bar in Pennsylvania using modern, mass-production techniques that make the product less expensive and thus available for mass consumption.
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The Cadbury Company develops a dairy milk chocolate.
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Theodore Tobler develops the unique triangular nougat filled chocolate candy bar called Toblerone.
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1908 `The Hershey Chocolate Company makes the first milk chocolate bar with almonds.
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yummmm!
