Where did chocolate come from?
Chocolate comes from the seeds of the cacao tree, native to South and Central America. The Olmec, Maya and Aztecs drank it as a bitter drink thousands of years ago.
The earliest evidence of cacao use comes from Ecuador, about 5,300 years ago. In Mesoamerica, the Olmec and later the Maya and Aztecs ground roasted cacao beans into a frothy drink, often flavored with chili or vanilla. Cacao beans were so valuable that the Aztecs used them as money.
Spanish explorers brought cacao to Europe in the 1500s, where people added sugar and drank it hot. Solid chocolate came much later. In 1847, the British company J.S. Fry & Sons made one of the first chocolate bars, and in 1875 Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter created milk chocolate using condensed milk developed by Henri Nestlé.
Where cacao grows today
Cacao trees grow only in warm, wet regions near the equator. Today most of the world's cacao comes from West Africa, especially Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.
Did You Know?
The scientific name of the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, means food of the gods in Greek.