4 Things You Might Not Know About Hot Chocolate
Chocolate in its hot beverage form is wonderful and you can get one of the best tasting hot chocolates direct from your UKVending drinks machine. So we thought we’d have a look at some of the most surprising and interesting facts about hot chocolate, here are four of the best things we discovered.
When you’re facing the very worst that Mother Nature can throw at you, you’re likely to reach for something comforting and reassuringly familiar, reach for the hot chocolate. Well British explorer Robert Falcon Scott did when he went to conquer Antarctica in January 1912. The drink kept him and his team of explorers warm but sadly Scott and fellow trekkers died in the attempt to get to the South Pole first, having been beaten by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen who had five times the amount of hot chocolate in his supplies.
If it was good enough for Scott in 1912 then it was just as good for the six members of a sled dog expedition in 1989. The team consumed no less than 2100 packets of Swiss Miss hot cocoa on their way to the South Pole.
Hot Cocoa was a morale boost to war weary soldiers during World War One. The YMCA sent more than 25,000 volunteers to France to establish comfort stations that in addition to magazines, cigarettes and snacks had lots and lots and lots of piping hot chocolate on the boil. These volunteers soon got given the nickname of ‘Red Triangle Men, a reference to the distinctive YMCA logo. By the end of the war the YMCA’s comfort stations stretched from Egypt to Russia.
When you ask for a large cup of hot chocolate bet you’d be surprised by the world’s largest ever cup of hot chocolate…it contained 880 gallons of the stuff. In 2013 Tampa Bay’s Museum of Science and Industry together with 300 local school children and students produced the world’s largest cup of hot chocolate that contained 1100 pounds of cocoa and 97 gallons of powdered milk. When the cup was unveiled to the world, local kids shot marshmallows into the hot chocolate using homemade catapults!