Brief History of Cocoa
Cocoa originated in the tropical regions of Central and South America, where it was first domesticated by the ancient Mayans and Aztecs. These civilizations prized cocoa for its flavor, nutritional value, and medicinal properties. They used cocoa beans to make a bitter drink, which was considered a luxury item and was often served at special occasions.
Cocoa as Currency
As the popularity of cocoa grew, so did its value. In many Mesoamerican cultures, cocoa beans became a standard unit of exchange, used to buy goods and services. This practice, known as commodity-based currency, was common in many ancient societies. Cocoa beans were used to pay taxes, tributes, and even dowries.
The use of cocoa as currency was not limited to Mesoamerica. In West Africa, cocoa beans were used as a form of currency in the 19th century. The beans were used to buy goods from European traders, who would then use them to purchase other commodities.
The Use of Cocoa in Trade
Cocoa played a significant role in trade, both within Mesoamerica and beyond. The beans were used to buy goods such as textiles, tools, and other luxury items. In some cases, cocoa beans were even used to pay for labor.
One of the most famous examples of cocoa’s use in trade is the Aztec empire. The Aztecs used cocoa beans to pay for goods from neighboring tribes, including cotton, feathers, and other luxury items. They also used cocoa beans to pay for labor, including the construction of temples and other public buildings.
Cocoa introduction to Europe
On the fourth voyage of Columbus, on 15 August 1502, the expedition came upon a Mayan trading canoe near an island in the Gulf of Honduras. A member of the Columbus expedition, while documenting the items on the canoe, noted the apparent value of cocoa beans based on the canoe crew's reaction when beans were dropped. However, they did not know what they were, nor that they could be used to make a drink. Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés may have been the first European to encounter chocolate when he observed it in the court of Moctezuma II in 1520.
By 1524, the Spanish had established control over central Mexico, and expanded cacao production while increasing tribute requirements in "frenzied" efforts to profit from cacao. Cacao was produced using forced labor under the encomienda labor system. During the 16th century Native Americans experienced a massive population decline and production decreased. In response, more cacao was produced on the Guayaquil coast of Ecuador, as well as in Venezuela, albeit of a lower quality and using slaves from Africa. This cacao was argued to be inferior as it was not the same variety as the Criollo type grown in Mesoamerica: this was the Forastero, which was native to South America and although it yielded more fruit and was more disease resistant, it tasted dry and bitter. As Guayaquil cacao flooded the Mexican market in the early 1600s, dropping prices, Guatemalan officials among others worked to ban Guayaquil cacao from the ports of Guatemalan ports and those of New Spain. Despite bans on importing this cacao around 1630, Guayaquil cacao continued to be exported by smugglers. The Spanish introduced cacao to the Caribbean around 1525, where it spread from Trinidad to Jamaica.
When was it spread across Europe
The exact date when chocolate was brought to Spain is unknown, and there is no evidence Cortés was responsible for its introduction. According to the earliest documented evidence, it was introduced to the Spanish court in 1544 by Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan nobles brought to Spain by Dominican friars, but it was not until 1585 that the first official shipment of cacao to Europe was recorded. Through the 16th century, the Spanish were interested in the medicinal qualities of Mesoamerican plants. Writers such as Bernal Díaz and Francisco Hernández, the royal physician to Philip II of Spain, claimed that chocolate was an aphrodisiac, and Hernández reported to Spain a range of conditions he believed chocolate and its additives could treat. As a result, Spain during this period viewed chocolate primarily as a medicinal substance. By the mid-16th century, chocolate was being manufactured and sold in large quantities. By the 17th century, Madrid had stored around 700,000 pounds of cacao.
From Spain, chocolate spread to other European nations: to Portugal, to Italy in the 17th century, and then outwards. Tracing the spread of chocolate in Europe is complicated by the religious wars and shifting allegiances of the time, but it is understood that it was driven by cosmopolitanism and missionaries. During the 17th century, drinking chocolate became very popular among the elite of Europe, and was believed to be an aphrodisiac. It was expensive due to the high transportation costs and import duties. From the late-16th century until the early 18th century, there was controversy about whether chocolate was both a food and a drink or just a drink; this distinction was important for determining if consumption violated ecclesiastical fasts. This dispute continued despite popes including Pope Pius V, Clement VII and Benedict XIV opining it did not break the fast. Most cacao imported to Europe in the 17th–18th centuries came from Venezuela.
With the difficulty in tracing the spread of chocolate across Europe, it is difficult to pinpoint when chocolate was introduced to France. However, evidence suggests it was first introduced as medicine. The silver chocolate pot, used to stir and beat chocolate, was thereafter invented by the French. By the 1670s, drinking chocolate was widespread among French aristocratic women, despite debate over whether chocolate was medically good or bad, and it would only be settled as beneficial by 1684 with the publication of a thesis defending chocolate by a Paris physician. Concerns about the health effects can be seen expressed in a 1671 letter by noblewoman Marie de Rabutin-Chantal: "The Marquise de Coëtlogon took so much chocolate during her pregnancy last year that she produced a small boy as black as the devil, who died."
Chocolate arrived in England from France around 1657, around the same time as tea and coffee, and encountered an initial backlash from those with medical concerns. Cocoa was supplied by Jamaican plantations, after the British conquered the Spanish territory in 1655. While chocolate had begun being flavored with new, highly perfumed ingredients such as jasmine and ambergris in Italy in the 17th century, in England chocolate was a commercial product and production was simpler and less careful. Chocolate was served in coffee houses to whoever could pay, and by the end of the 17th century it was compulsory to include it in British Navy rations. From England, chocolate spread to the North American colonies by the late-17th century. Chocolate was well established among the elite of the late-17th-century Philippines, brought over by the conquering Spanish.
Cocoa in the 18th Century
In 1828, Coenraad Johannes van Houten received a patent for the manufacturing process of making Dutch cocoa. The process removed cocoa butter from chocolate liquor, the result of milling, by enough to create a cake that could be pulverized into a powder. This would later permit large-scale, cheap chocolate production, in powdered and solid forms, opening up mass consumption. At the time, however, there was no market for cocoa butter, and it took until the 1860s to be widely used. Chocolate was often adulterated, including by firms such as Cadbury, which resulted in the creation of food standards laws. With improvements in production, a worker in 1890 could produce fifty times more chocolate paste than the same worker could before the Industrial Revolution.
Quakers were active in chocolate entrepreneurship in the Industrial Revolution, setting up the firms J. S. Fry & Sons, Cadbury, and Rowntree's. They were teetotalers, and believed chocolate was a good alternative to alcohol. In 1847, Fry's invented a method of mixing cocoa butter with cocoa powder and sugar to invent a non-brittle and dry eating chocolate, commonly considered the first chocolate bar. A corresponding increase in cocoa butter prices made this, for a time, a food of the elite. Competition between Cadbury and Fry's in the 19th century created the chocolate box and the chocolate Easter egg. Quaker firms built model villages, such as Bournville, to promote worker morality and living conditions. This paternalistic concern was shared by other, irreligious chocolate manufacturers.
In 1819, François-Louis Cailler opened the first chocolate factory in Switzerland. The factory featured the first melanger (chocolate mixing machine), and produced chocolate more bitter than is now common. In the 1860s, Van Houten's Cocoa alkalized cocoa powder, which improved taste and darkened appearance. Modern milk chocolate was invented in 1875 when Swiss chocolate manufacturer Daniel Peter combined the recently invented powdered milk with chocolate and achieved public acceptance after 1900. Milk had previously been added to chocolate, but it was expensive and difficult to keep fresh. In 1879, the conching process was invented by the Swiss chocolatier Rodolphe Lindt, which heats and agitates liquid chocolate for days to change flavor and increase smoothness. Before Lindt invented conching, chocolate had been gritty. He kept conching as a trade secret for more than 20 years. Able to integrate more smoothly with batters and doughs, conching allowed chocolate to become a more common ingredient in baking.
In the early 19th century, the Portuguese began commercial cacao growing in West Africa after their colonies in South America gained independence. Introducing the crop to São Tomé from Brazil in 1824, widespread cultivation soon spread across Africa. In bringing cacao to Africa from Brazil, the Portuguese also recreated the slave plantation system. When Portugal made slavery illegal in 1869 after large international pressure, production was maintained by creating a captive workforce through "legal trickery". São Tomé and Príncipe became the largest producer in 1905. Although cacao had historically been grown on a mix of estates and smallholdings, by 1914 the latter was becoming dominant.
The price of chocolate began to drop dramatically in the 1890s and 1900s as production of chocolate shifted from the Americas to Asia and Africa. From 1880 to 1914, the mass market for chocolate experienced huge growth: between 1896 and 1909, chocolate consumption in the United States increased 414%, and similarly quadrupled between 1880 and 1902 in England. Eating chocolate overtook drinking chocolate in market share in the early 1900s, but this growth was largely restricted to Western nations.
After receiving the attention of journalists and activists, Cadbury began inquiring into labor practices in the Portuguese cacao industry in the first decade of the 20th century. A 1908 report by Cadbury agent Joseph Burtt described the system as "de facto slavery". In 1909, Fry's, Cadbury, and Rowntree's boycotted plantations in Portuguese territories which generally improved working conditions, although not entirely. Cadbury moved sourcing to the British colony of the Gold Coast, today Ghana, which became the largest producer of cacao in 1911. It remained the largest producer until it was overtaken by the Ivory Coast in 1977. The growth in the West African cocoa industry was driven by a combination of colonial pressures and a European market.
Cocoa in the 21th Century
As of 2006, drinks were still made from cacao seeds across Mesoamerica, including the beverages bupu and tejate from Oaxaca. In many rural areas of Central America and Mexico, disks of sweetened chocolate were sold at local markets as of 2017. In the 2000s, consumption grew in Africa; in Nigeria, for example, the market grew 775% between 2006 and 2013. Dark chocolate experienced a "popular resurgent interest" by 2009 from public attention around health claims concerning its polyphenolic antioxidants, and raw and organic chocolates were observed to have risen in popularity as of 2018. As of 2010, the bean-to-bar movement was unregulated, and producers' claims of provenance and quality were criticized. Cacao growers and initial processors aim to meet minimum standards. The genetic purity of variants has been contested, as they crosspollinate with other variants. From this ambiguity, growers exaggerate types. In 2013, there were at least 37 bean-to-bar producers in the United States, increasing from one in 1997. Most did not source from West Africa, despite its dominance in cacao production.
Slave labor among African cacao growers gained public attention after the release of the documentary Slavery: A Global Investigation in 2000. In 2005, a non-binding, voluntary industry agreement called the Harkin–Engel Protocol created by US Congress members was created to address child and forced labor. The media's reporting on this issue is often sensationalistic, and as of 2018, the topic had not been systematically studied. Issues with child labor are not restricted to Africa. Awareness of labor conditions of cacao growers spurred demand for fair trade chocolate.
As of 2019, the cacao industry was under threat by the emergence of diseases; by 2017 up to 38% of cacao harvested annually was lost to disease. As of 2023, the industry's sustainability was threatened by the need for deforesting for more land, poor soil management, persistent poverty and forced labor among cacao farmers, and climate change. As of 2018, there was "little evidence" that initiatives to reduce child labor had been effective. In 2022, Ghana and the Ivory Coast supplied 57% of the world's cocoa.
In 2023, cocoa processors Olam, Cargill, and Barry Callebaut controlled 40% of trade between countries. As of 2018, chocolate-makers Mars, Mondelez (owner of Cadbury), Ferrero, Nestlé and Hershey, known as the 'Big Five', comprised almost two-thirds of the global chocolate market. The international trade in chocolate was worth US$108 billion in 2018, and the largest market and consumption per capita remained in the West.