Chocolate was a drink for thousands of years before it was a bar, and much of what we eat today depends on a few stubborn people and a lot of clever machinery. These stories follow cacao from ancient pottery to a European argument over its very name, and candy from a jar of jelly beans at Cabinet meetings to a pilot who dropped sweets on parachutes. Along the way, a few favorite myths melt.
Every tile in a Chocolate and Candy game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Chocolate
nine stories
1The earliest cacao evidence is from the Amazon
On the tile: Amazon cacao5,300 years ago
Chocolate's story usually begins in Mexico and Central America, but the oldest evidence so far comes from South America. At Santa Ana-La Florida, a site in the upper Amazon of southeastern Ecuador, archaeologists found cacao starch grains, traces of the cacao compound theobromine, and ancient cacao DNA on pottery and stone artifacts. The Mayo-Chinchipe people were using cacao, probably as a drink, about 5,300 years ago. The discovery pushed the known history of cacao use back by about 1,500 years.
In Mesoamerica, cacao beans served as currency. Hayes Lavis, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, says that sometime in the 1500s a turkey cost 100 cacao beans. Money that valuable invites forgery. Anthropologist Joel Palka says archaeologists at several sites in Mexico and Guatemala have come across what look like remarkably well preserved cacao beans, until they touch them and find they are made of clay. The clay beans may have been passed off as money, or used in place of real cacao in rituals.
3Chocolate reached New Mexico a thousand years ago
On the tile: Pueblo Bonito1000-1125
At Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon, University of New Mexico archaeologist Patricia Crown selected broken pottery from cylinder jars and pitchers, dated by their decoration to between 1000 and 1125. Her collaborator W. Jeffrey Hurst tested them and found theobromine, a chemical marker for cacao. It was the first concrete evidence that anyone in the American Southwest had traded for cacao beans, which until then had been found no farther north than central Mexico. The trade route behind them stretched about 2,000 kilometers.
4Chocolate's Quaker families were fighting alcohol
On the tile: Quakers1800s
Britain's chocolate trade was long dominated by Quaker firms, among them Cadbury of Birmingham, Fry's of Bristol and Rowntree's of York. According to Quaker historian Helen Rowlands, their move into chocolate began in the 19th century with cocoa drinks, part of the temperance movement's concern about alcohol misuse. Cocoa was cheap, and making it meant boiling the water at a time of poor water supplies. The dominance is striking because Quakers were so few. In 1851 they were only about one in 1,400 people in England, Scotland and Wales.
Nacional cacao from Ecuador was famous for its strong aroma and especially prized in Hamburg, Germany, then the center of the global cocoa trade. Then a blight called frosty pod rot struck in 1916, and in 1919 witches' broom disease was thought to have finished off Nacional trees for good. Growers turned to other varieties. In 2011 the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and Fortunato Chocolate announced they had identified trees in Peru with ancient Nacional DNA. Families in Ecuador are now replanting it.
Theodor Tobler and his cousin Emil Baumann launched Toblerone in 1908, and it has been made in Bern ever since. The name joins Tobler with torrone, an almond nougat. Its packaging showed the Matterhorn, whose pyramid-shaped peak mirrors the bar, and hidden inside the mountain was a bear, the heraldic animal of Bern. In 2023 owner Mondelez said the Matterhorn would give way to a more generic Alpine summit, because some production was moving to Slovakia and Swiss rules restrict the use of Swiss symbols in marketing.
Long before Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl was a boarder at Repton School in Derbyshire, England, from 1930 to 1934. During those years Cadbury used Dahl and his schoolmates to taste and rate new products before they went to market. A Repton housemaster told the BBC that Cadbury set up a blind testing facility at the school. Repton believes the experience sparked Dahl's lifelong love of chocolate, which culminated in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl devoted a whole section of his autobiography, Boy, to his Repton years.
Chocolate behaves in some ways more like steel than like other foods. Its cocoa butter can crystallize in six different forms that melt at different temperatures, so chocolatiers melt it and then carefully adjust the temperature to favor just one, called Form V. That is the crystal that gives a glossy surface, a sharp snap, and chocolate that melts in your mouth but not in your hand. The work is not permanent. Over months, chocolate can shift to the more stable Form VI and develop a grayish coating called bloom.
In 2017 Barry Callebaut, the world's largest cocoa processor, unveiled ruby chocolate, which is pink with no added coloring. The company said it had found the potential in a type of cocoa bean 13 years earlier, and ruby was billed as the first new natural color of chocolate since Nestlé introduced white chocolate more than 80 years before. It did not fit American rules. In 2019 the Food and Drug Administration issued a temporary permit to market-test ruby chocolate, because it deviated from U.S. standards for chocolate in composition, taste and color.
Candy corn was invented in the 1880s by George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company. In 1898 the Goelitz Confectionery Company, today's Jelly Belly Candy Company, bought the recipe and sold it as Chicken Feed, a name meant to appeal to a country that was still largely rural. Confectioners of the day also made candy pumpkins, turnips and chestnuts. Each colored layer was once poured by hand into a kernel-shaped mold. The process is automated now, but the recipe is essentially the same.
Before Sweethearts said Be Mine, their ancestors had room for whole sentences. Oliver Chase and his brother Daniel, lozenge makers in Boston, got the idea of printing sayings on their candy from cockles, shell-shaped sugar wafers with paper mottoes tucked inside. At first they printed by hand, on lozenges big enough for lines like "Please send a lock of your hair by return mail." In 1866 Daniel invented a machine that printed directly onto lozenges with vegetable dye. In 1902 the company began making printed hearts, and Sweethearts were born.
Ronald Reagan took up jelly beans in the 1960s to help him give up pipe smoking. As governor of California, he got a monthly supply from their maker, the Herman Goelitz Candy Company, and in 1973 he wrote to the company that "we can hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around the jar of jelly beans." He ordered three and a half tons of red, white and blue beans for his 1981 inauguration. The company, now Jelly Belly, credited him with making it a worldwide company overnight.
In 1947 the Life Savers Corporation sued the Curtiss Candy Company, maker of Baby Ruth, arguing that the roll for Curtiss Assorted Fruit Drops looked too much like Life Savers' five-flavor pack. Witnesses said they simply grabbed the colored package. Curtiss replied that Life Savers wanted a monopoly on fruit drops in multicolored labels. Judge Elwyn Shaw dismissed the complaint, concluding that unless Life Savers was to be given "a patent on all colored and candy mints" its trademark was not infringed. An appeals court agreed.
Van Halen's contract rider really did demand a bowl of M&M's with no brown ones, and a scan of the document survives. Stories about it spread from 1980 as proof of rock star excess. In his 1997 autobiography, David Lee Roth gave a practical reason: the line was buried among technical requirements, and a brown M&M meant the venue had not read the contract, so everything needed checking. Writer Doug Mack, in an essay republished by Smithsonian magazine, doubts it. By late 1980 the demand was so widely reported that it could no longer work as a secret test.
During the Berlin Airlift of 1948, American pilot Gail Halvorsen met children at the fence of Berlin's Tempelhof air base. He handed them two sticks of gum and promised to drop more sweets from his plane, wiggling its wings so they would know it was him. Other pilots donated their candy rations, donations poured in from the United States, and the effort, called Operation Little Vittles, dropped candy on small parachutes for months. Germans remembered him as the Chocolate Flyer, and his wing signal earned him another nickname, Uncle Wiggly Wings.
Many parents are sure that candy makes children hyperactive. In a 1994 study, researchers worked with 35 boys whose mothers called them sugar sensitive. Every boy actually got a placebo, the sweetener aspartame, but some mothers were told their sons had just had a large dose of sugar. Those mothers rated their boys as significantly more hyperactive. A 1995 analysis in JAMA of 23 blinded studies concluded that sugar does not affect children's behavior or cognitive performance, though a small effect could not be ruled out.
German confectioner Hans Riegel created the first bear-shaped gummies in 1922 and called them Dancing Bears. They were larger and slimmer than today's, reportedly inspired by the real dancing bears that entertained children at European festivals. In 1960 his company, Haribo, rebranded them Goldbears. America caught on late. The Herman Goelitz Candy Company, now Jelly Belly, made the first gummy bears in the United States in 1981, and Haribo opened its first American office in 1982. Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears followed in 1985.
Enric Bernat noticed that sweets did not suit their main customers, children. As he explained it, they "got their hands sticky and ran into trouble with their parents. So I stuck a sweet on a stick." In 1958 he bought an ailing apple-products plant in Asturias, Spain, built his own machinery and sold his lollipops on wooden sticks for one peseta each. The firm became Chupa Chups, and in 1969 Salvador Dalí designed its logo, working the name into a brightly colored daisy. By 1996, about 20 million Chupa Chups products a day were eaten around the world.
Milton Hershey returned to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, after his New York City candy business failed, and in 1886 started the Lancaster Caramel Company, his third confectionery venture. His credit was bad. When a British importer placed a large order, the cashier at the Lancaster County National Bank lent him the money for ingredients and backed the loan with his own signature. When the payment came, Hershey ran down the street to the bank with his apron still on. In 1900 he sold the caramel company for $1 million but kept his chocolate company.
Harry Burnett Reese moved to Hershey, Pennsylvania, around 1917 to work as a dairyman on the chocolate company's farms. "If Hershey can sell a trainload of chocolate every day," he reasoned, "I can at least make a living making candy." His first candy business, in nearby Hummelstown, failed. He tried again in his basement, and about 1928 he began making peanut butter cups as part of a candy assortment, coated with Hershey chocolate. Reese had 16 children, and a family photograph captioned "16 Good Reasons to Buy Reese's" ran in his ads. In 1963 the company was sold to Hershey.
Forrest Mars, son of Mars candy founder Frank Mars, expected chocolate to run short in the coming war. So for his new candy he teamed up with Bruce Murrie, whose father Bill was president of the Hershey Chocolate Company, to secure a supply. The candy was named M&M's, for Mars and Murrie, and the first ones were made for the U.S. military in 1941. After wartime quotas ended in 1948, Forrest Mars maneuvered Bruce Murrie out of the partnership and went on to become Hershey's largest competitor.
Hans Riegel founded Haribo, short for Hans Riegel Bonn, on December 13, 1920, in a home kitchen with a sack of sugar, a marble slab, a stool, a stove, a copper pot and a rolling pin. In 1921 his wife, Gertrud, became the company's first employee, and until Haribo bought its first car, she delivered the daily production by bicycle. Hans died in 1945 at the age of 52. Gertrud managed the company for a brief period after World War II, until their sons Hans and Paul took over in 1946.
Domenico Ghirardelli was born in Rapallo, Italy, and apprenticed with a local candy maker as a boy. In 1847 he changed his first name to its Spanish equivalent, Domingo. In 1849 he sailed to California and opened a general store in Stockton, selling supplies and confections to miners. In 1852 he opened a confectionery shop in San Francisco that eventually became the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed much of the city, the Ghirardelli plant was not damaged and was back in operation within 10 days.
6Switzerland's oldest chocolate brand began in a mill
On the tile: Cailler1819
Switzerland does not grow a single cocoa bean, yet it became a chocolate power, and François-Louis Cailler was one early reason. After four years as a chocolatier's apprentice in Turin, he came home and in 1819 converted a former mill near Vevey, overlooking Lake Geneva, into a chocolate factory. That established the oldest brand of Swiss chocolate still in existence. In 1832 he put water power to work crushing the cocoa and mixing in the sugar. In 1863 Cailler's daughter Fanny married a local candlemaker named Daniel Peter, who would make chocolate history of his own.
Bob Born earned a degree in engineering physics, served in the Navy, and was accepted to medical school. While waiting for classes to start, he went to work at Just Born, the candy company his father had founded, and never left. In 1953 Just Born bought Rodda Candy Co., which made shaped marshmallow candies by hand, a process that took about 27 hours. Born and a company engineer built a machine that did it in less than six minutes. Machines based on his design now turn out 5.5 million Peeps a day.
William James Morrison of Nashville was a dentist, and a prominent one: in 1894 he became president of the Tennessee State Dental Association. He was also a lawyer, a children's author and an inventor. In 1897 he and John C. Wharton, a fellow Nashville candy maker, conceived an electric candy machine whose spinning vessel turned melted sugar into silk-like threads. Their patent was granted in 1899. The treat, then called Fairy Floss, was introduced to the public at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.
Oliver Chase, an English-born pharmacist in Boston, made lozenges by rolling ropes of sugar dough and cutting them into tablets, slow and painstaking work. In 1847 he came up with a lozenge-cutting machine that resembled a hand-cranked pasta maker and stamped out dozens of identical lozenges at once. The company he founded with his brother became Necco, the New England Confectionery Company. Many sources cite an 1847 patent, but a Smithsonian magazine search could not confirm one. The patent it did find, for a version of his lozenge machine, dates from 1857.
In April 1937 Captain Paul Logan of the Army Quartermaster General's office asked Hershey for an unusual bar: about four ounces, able to withstand high temperatures, high in food energy, and tasting just a little better than a boiled potato. A tastier bar might be eaten before the emergency came. Chief chemist Sam Hinkle cut the sugar and increased the chocolate liquor, making a paste so heavy it had to be pressed into molds. Each bar held 600 calories. By one estimate, more than three billion ration units went to soldiers between 1940 and 1945.
Daniel Peter of Vevey, Switzerland, was a candlemaker until the growing success of oil lamps forced him to change careers. Having learned chocolate making from his in-laws, he founded his own chocolate company in 1867, but business was poor. His neighbor Henri Nestlé had developed a powdered milk product, so Peter tried adding it to his chocolate. Mildew ruined the attempt. Peter asked Nestlé for condensed milk instead, and in 1875 he finally cracked the problem. Perfecting the recipe took years more, and his Gala Peter milk chocolate brand was launched in 1887.
Early eating chocolate was generally gritty and often bitter. In 1879 Rudolf Lindt, who had opened a chocolate factory in Bern, developed the conche, a machine for long, intense mixing, stirring and aerating of heated liquid chocolate. The story, as the Lindt company has told it, is that he left the machine running over a weekend, whether by accident or on purpose, and on Monday found chocolate that shone and smelled wonderful. Whatever the truth, the secret was valuable. In 1899 Lindt sold his factory, and the secret of conching, to Rudolf Sprüngli.
In 1819 a young Philippe Suchard was working in his brother's confectionery shop in Bern. Seven years later he set up his own chocolate factory in Serrières, in the canton of Neuchâtel. Chocolate at the time was fairly grainy and gritty, so Suchard, reportedly a great chocolate lover, invented the mélangeur, a mixing machine that ground sugar and cocoa powder into a smooth paste. It paid off. By 1883 Suchard was producing half of all the chocolate made in Switzerland, and in 1901 the company launched Milka.
Hershey's Kisses first appeared in 1907, wrapped by hand in foil with a square of tissue paper inside that identified them as Hershey's. The trouble was that buyers could not see that identification until they unwrapped the candy, so imitators thrived. In August 1921 Hershey introduced wrapping machinery that inserted a strip of paper printed with the brand name, the plume. The conical wrapper and plume were trademarked in 1924. How Kisses got their name is still a mystery. Some suggest the machines make a sound like a kiss.
Austrian Eduard Haas III, an anti-smoking advocate, wanted a peppermint tablet that would freshen breath and help people cut down on smoking. He named it by taking the first, middle and last letters of Pfefferminz, German for peppermint. The first dispensers, designed by engineer Oscar Uxa, went on sale in 1949 and looked more like cigarette lighters. In the United States, though, there was little interest in cutting down on smoking, so PEZ switched to fruit flavors, marketed to children, and in 1955 introduced its first character dispensers, a robot and Santa Claus.
After World War II, cocoa was extremely scarce in Italy. Pietro Ferrero, a baker in Alba, a Piedmont town known for hazelnuts, found a workaround: a sweet paste made mostly from local hazelnuts, with just a little of the precious cocoa. In 1946 he sold it as Giandujot, a loaf sliced with a knife and eaten on bread. In 1951 it became the spreadable Supercrema, and the knife was now for spreading. In 1964 an improved recipe went into the first jar of Nutella, a name joining the English word nut to the cheerful Italian suffix -ella.
Chicle, a resin from the sapodilla tree, was chewed by the Maya, and the Aztecs used it to freshen breath. Centuries later the American inventor Thomas Adams Sr. got a supply of chicle through a connection to Antonio López de Santa Anna, the exiled Mexican president, though exactly how is murky. Adams and his sons first tried to turn chicle into an industrial material like rubber. Then they hit on a better idea: boiling it and rolling it by hand into chewing gum. Their first batch sold out at a local drugstore in hours.
In the 1920s a child in a red-and-white hat appeared in ads selling peppermint candy canes for a candy company in Albany, Georgia. The company, which began in 1919 and became Bobs Candies, used a device called the Keller Machine in the 1950s to twist and cut its scrap bits of stick candy into pieces it could sell. By 1958 the machine had been perfected to mass-produce the hooked candy cane. By the end of the decade Bobs was making 1.8 million sticks of candy a day.