How did we get the chocolate bar?

As you munch down on your delicious chocolate bar bought from one of UKVending’s modern vending machines, have you ever wondered how did we get the chocolate bar we have today?

Well the history goes back to the Aztecs and the Spanish who brought back some cocoa from the New World. The chocolate was for the next four or five hundred years only thought of as a drink, but in 1847 Joseph Fry worked out how to make them into a solid. He took cocoa butter mixed it with cocoa powder and some sugar to make a paste. This was then poured in molds and allowed to set. Soon he was churning out Fry’s Chocolate Cream bars from his Bristol factory.

Unfortunately in 1866 the chocolate was very bitter and it would take the Swiss businessman Henri Nestle to make the next great leap when he poured milk into the mix to make the chocolate taste sweeter and in so doing created milk chocolate as we know it today.

In 1900, American Milton S Hershey brought out the very first chocolate bars that were sold in individual wrappers and the chocolate bars that we know and love have stayed the much the same for the last 120 years.

Around the world annually we love our chocolate bars with $98 billion sold every year!