Humans have loved chocolate for millennia. The cacao tree was first domesticated around 5,300 years ago in the upper Amazon region of northwest South America, but it wasn’t until 1847 that the world saw its first true chocolate bar. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The British chocolate company Fry & Sons were the first to work out that you could made an easily mass-produced moldable bar by mixing cocoa powder, sugar, and cocoa butter. Earlier cultures had made solid cacao pastes, but this was the first product chocolate consumers today would recognize as a chocolate bar.

From there, things evolved quickly. A Swiss chocolatier, Daniel Peter, introduced milk chocolate in the 1870s. Since then we’ve made dark chocolate,

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