Timeline of Chocolate
Chocolate and the cacao behind it, from cacao drinks in Mesoamerica around 1900 BCE through the Olmec, Maya and Aztecs, its adoption in Europe and industrial chocolate-making to the cocoa price crisis of 2024.
- Category
- Agriculture & Food
- Events
- 22 events ~1900 BCE – 2024
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
~1900 BCE: Mokaya villagers in Chiapas drink cacao
A neckless jar dated 1900 – 1500 BCE from Paso de la Amada, an early village of the Mokaya culture on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico, tested positive for theobromine, a compound that in Mesoamerica points to cacao. It is among the earliest evidence of cacao use in the region. The tree itself came from the upper Amazon: residues, starch grains and ancient DNA show people at Santa Ana-La Florida in southeastern Ecuador using cacao about 5,300 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chocolate#Mesoamerica~1800 – 1000 BCE: Olmec at San Lorenzo use cacao in rituals
Chemical tests on pottery from San Lorenzo, the leading Olmec center on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, found cacao residues in vessels used from about 1800 BCE to 1000 BCE, including in a mortuary ritual for sacrificial victims at the height of the city's power. The word cacao goes back to kakawa, which many linguists trace to the Mixe–Zoquean languages the Olmec are thought to have spoken, though a Nahuatl origin has also been argued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Lorenzo_Tenochtitl%C3%A1n~600 BCE: Preclassic Maya at Colha drink cacao
Spouted jars from the Maya site of Colha in northern Belize, dated about 600 – 400 BCE, held residues of theobromine and caffeine, a pairing found in Mesoamerica only in cacao. Chemists at the Hershey Foods Technical Center and University of Texas archaeologists reported the result in 2002; it was then the earliest chemical evidence of cacao use, and the report linked the vessels to foamed chocolate drinks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobroma_cacao#Ancient_uses5th century: Maya scribes label a pot for cacao
A lidded vessel from Tomb 19 at Río Azul in northeastern Guatemala, buried in the Early Classic period, carries a painted hieroglyphic text that the epigrapher David Stuart read as including kakaw, the Maya word for cacao. Residues in it and other vessels from the tomb contained theobromine and caffeine, so the inscription and the chemistry independently identified what the pots had held.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%ADo_Azullate 15th century: Aztec Empire takes cacao as tribute from Soconusco
Frost kept cacao from growing in the Valley of Mexico, so the Aztecs obtained it by trade and tribute. Under the ruler Ahuitzotl they conquered Soconusco, a cacao region on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, and the Codex Mendoza, compiled around 1541, lists loads of cacao beans among its tribute. Spanish accounts describe the drink, often flavored with chili, vanilla or flowers, as mainly for nobles, warriors and long-distance merchants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soconusco1502: Columbus's men meet a trading canoe carrying cacao
On Christopher Columbus's fourth voyage, near the island of Guanaja off Honduras, his men boarded a large trading canoe, probably Maya, and took cargo that included cacao beans. Ferdinand Columbus, the admiral's son, later described the paddlers hurrying to pick up any beans that fell, but the Europeans did not learn that the beans served as money and as the basis of a drink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chocolate#European_encounters1520: Cortés reports cacao beans used as money
In his second letter to Emperor Charles V, dated October 30, 1520, Hernán Cortés described cacao as a fruit like almonds that was ground, sold and valued so highly that it was used as money throughout the land. Later colonial records show the same practice: a 1545 price list from Tlaxcala valued a good turkey hen at 100 cacao beans and a large tomato at one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_relation_letter_from_Hern%C3%A1n_Cort%C3%A9s_to_emperor_Charles_V1544: Maya nobles bring chocolate to the Spanish court
The earliest documented chocolate in Spain arrived with Qʼeqchiʼ Maya nobles from Guatemala whom Dominican friars brought to meet Prince Philip, the future Philip II, with gifts that included vessels of beaten chocolate. The first officially recorded shipment of cacao to Europe is dated to 1585. Spanish colonists, at first put off by the drink, sweetened it with cane sugar, spiced it with cinnamon and anise, and drank it hot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chocolate#Spread~1657: Chocolate drinking reaches London
Drinking chocolate spread from Spain to Italy, France and beyond during the 17th century and reached England around 1657, at about the same time as coffee and tea. London's coffeehouses and chocolate houses sold it to anyone who could pay, and the English seizure of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 gave England its own cacao. Samuel Pepys recorded drinking "jocolatte, very good" at a coffeehouse on November 24, 1664.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_chocolate#Introduction_to_Europe1728: Spain charters the Caracas Company for cacao trade
Philip V of Spain granted Basque merchants from Gipuzkoa the Royal Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas, a monopoly on trade between Spain and the Province of Caracas meant to end Dutch smuggling of Venezuelan cacao, the main source of Europe's supply in the 17th and 18th centuries. The cacao was grown on coastal estates worked largely by enslaved Africans, and resentment of the company's grip fueled a revolt in 1749 led by Juan Francisco de León.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guipuzcoan_Company_of_Caracas1753: Linnaeus names the cacao tree Theobroma cacao
In "Species Plantarum", the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus gave the cacao tree its binomial name, joining a genus name from Greek meaning "food of the gods" to cacao, the Spanish form of the Mesoamerican word. The species is a small understory tree native to the Amazon rainforest and grown mainly within about 20 degrees of the equator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobroma_cacao#Nomenclature1828: Van Houten patents a press for cocoa powder
The Van Houten family's hydraulic press extracted cocoa butter from ground cacao, leaving a cake that could be milled into cocoa powder. The patent is attributed to Casparus van Houten, while his son Coenraad Johannes became associated with treating cocoa with alkaline salts, the "Dutch process". These methods helped separate drinking cocoa and eating chocolate into mass-market products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coenraad_Johannes_van_Houten1847: Fry's molds a bar of eating chocolate
J. S. Fry & Sons of Bristol developed a moldable eating chocolate that became an early commercial chocolate bar. Earlier makers had already sold solid chocolate for eating, so claims that Fry's invented the category need qualification. The firm later introduced Fry's Chocolate Cream in 1866.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._Fry_%26_Sons1875: Daniel Peter makes milk chocolate in Vevey
Daniel Peter, a candle maker turned chocolatier in Vevey, Switzerland, and son-in-law of the chocolate maker François-Louis Cailler, overcame the water in milk that spoiled chocolate by using concentrated milk, helped by his neighbor Henri Nestlé; sources differ on whether it was condensed or powdered. He is usually credited with inventing milk chocolate, though a Dresden firm had advertised a solid milk chocolate in 1839. His Gala Peter brand followed in 1887.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Peter1879: Tetteh Quarshie plants cacao in the Gold Coast
Tetteh Quarshie, a blacksmith from Osu in Accra who had worked on the Spanish island of Fernando Po (now Bioko), brought cacao pods home to the British Gold Coast and started a farm at Mampong in Akuapem, which Ghana's Cocoa Board dates to 1879. Earlier plantings, including Basel Mission trials from the 1850s, had not taken hold, and who succeeded first is disputed. Cacao spread fast among African smallholders, and by 1911 the colony was the world's leading cocoa producer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetteh_Quarshie1879: Lindt develops the conche in Bern
Rodolphe Lindt opened a chocolate factory in Bern, Switzerland, and developed the conche, a machine that worked warm chocolate for prolonged periods to improve its texture and flavor. Combined with added cocoa butter, the process produced smoother eating chocolate. Lindt sold his factory and manufacturing process to Chocolat Sprüngli in 1899.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conching1900: Hershey begins selling milk chocolate bars
Milton S. Hershey, a caramel maker in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, bought German chocolate machinery after seeing it at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, sold his caramel company in 1900 and late that year began selling Hershey's Milk Chocolate bars for 2 to 10 cents. His factory in Derry Township, finished in 1905, was built to mass-produce milk chocolate cheaply, and the company town of Hershey grew up around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_bar1909: British chocolate makers boycott São Tomé cocoa
São Tomé and Príncipe, Portuguese islands that led world cocoa exports from 1905, relied on contract laborers from Angola and other colonies who in practice could not leave, as Henry Nevinson's 1906 book "A Modern Slavery" and an inquiry funded by Cadbury and other chocolate firms reported. Cadbury announced a boycott in March 1909, joined by Fry's, Rowntree's and the German firm Stollwerck, and shifted its buying to the Gold Coast; it also won a libel case against The Standard, which had accused it of profiting from slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_production_in_S%C3%A3o_Tom%C3%A9_and_Pr%C3%ADncipe1994: Maya Gold earns Britain's first Fairtrade Mark
Green & Black's Maya Gold, an organic chocolate bar made with cacao from the Toledo Cacao Growers' Association in southern Belize, many of whose members are Maya, became the first product in Britain to carry the Fairtrade Mark. The company had offered the growers a five-year rolling contract at a fixed price more than double the market rate, and fair trade and other certification labels later spread across the cocoa trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_%26_Black%27s2001: Chocolate industry signs the Harkin–Engel Protocol
After reports in 2000 and 2001 of trafficked children on West African cocoa farms, and a House vote to fund labels for cocoa grown without child slave labor, Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Eliot Engel brokered a voluntary industry pledge, signed in September 2001, to end the worst forms of child labor in cocoa growing in Ivory Coast and Ghana. A survey funded by the US Department of Labor estimated that 1.56 million children there were in child labor in cocoa production in 2018 – 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkin%E2%80%93Engel_Protocol2010: Scientists sequence the cacao genome
One team announced a draft genome of the Matina 1-6 variety in September, and an international consortium led by French researchers published the genome of a Criollo landrace from Belize in "Nature Genetics" in December, identifying 28,798 protein-coding genes. The sequences help breeders select trees resistant to the diseases that destroy much of the crop each year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobroma_cacao#Genome2024: Cocoa prices climb to record highs
After poor harvests in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together grow more than half the world's cocoa, blamed on erratic weather linked to climate change, aging trees, cacao swollen shoot virus and black pod disease, cocoa futures climbed through 2024 to record highs above US$12,000 per metric ton in December. Prices fell back sharply during 2025 as chocolate demand weakened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_crisis_(2020s)