How the Dutch Made Chocolate

• Posted on 31 January 2024
• By Daniel Vandersteen
• 0

How the Dutch contributed to the long history of chocolate.

With Valentine’s day on the horizon, you may be thinking of where to get your sweetheart a nice box of chocolates. Chocolate has been around for centuries, first cultivated in central America by the indigenous peoples including Maya and Aztecs. But the modern box of chocolates exists thanks to the Dutch!

Archaeological records suggest humans were eating chocolate as far back as 480BC. For most of its history, chocolate derived from cocoa beans was a drink, similar to what we might imagine as hot cocoa now. It was often sweetened with honey to counter the natural bitterness of the cocoa bean.

Chocolate was a hot commodity from the beginning. Aztecs even had a myth that one of their gods was punished for sharing cocoa with humans! Because the Aztec empire had little land suitable for growing cocoa beans, they imported it and cocoa beans themselves became a valuable currency.

When the Spanish arrived in central America and conquered the Aztecs, they brought chocolate drinks back to Europe with them. The market for chocolate quickly exploded, and in 1662 the Pope even declared that drinking chocolate didn’t count as breaking a religious fast!

Of course with expanding demand came terrible costs. Slavery of indigenous central Americans and Africans increased as Europeans demand more labour to grow and harvest the cocoa beans. Sadly this continues to this day in many parts of the world, with brands like Tony’s Chocolonely taking big steps toward fighting modern food slavery.

To get from the chocolate drink to the modern chocolate bar required a key innovation: the Dutch Cocoa Process. Dutch Process was invented in 1828 by Coenraad van Houten and allowed cocoa powder to be produced significantly cheaper and more efficiently. In 1847 an English chocolatier would combine cocoa butter, cocoa powder and sugar to create the first chocolate bar.

Since then, chocolate bars have overtaken drinks as the main way we consume chocolate. We consume 7.3 million metric tons every year! So that heart-shaped box for your valentine is just a drop in the ocean, but we’re sure they’ll appreciate it all the same.