How Milk Chocolate was Born

The story of the classic chocolate milk bar as we know it was dependent on a series of events spanning hundreds of years.  Long before chocolate was ever consumed in solid form, it was prepared as a beverage, similar to that of coffee, made by brewing cacao beans and adding spices.

As early as 1500 BC, the Olmecs were likely the first to ferment, roast, and grind cacao beans for drinks and gruels.  This ritual spread across Mesoamerica and was eventually discovered by European voyagers.  In 1687, a travelling British physician named Sir Hans Sloane, Baronet visited Jamaica and was introduced to this cacao beverage.  But because the original recipe bothered his stomach, he added milk to make it more digestible.  He brought his version of this ancient beverage back to London, where it was sold in apothecaries for centuries.

But before it could come to market in solid form, another discovery needed to be made.  The manufacture of milk powder in the Victorian era changed everything.

The process of preserving milk by drying it is actually a much older concept that dates back to the 1200s, when Marco Polo wrote accounts of the Mongols sun-drying skim milk during wartime.

Years before Louis Pasteur’s research would uncover bacteria as the cause for food spoilage, one candymaker was determined to find a way to preserve food for a cash prize.  Enter Nicolas Appert, known as the "Father of modern canning."

During the French Revolutionary Wars in 1795, the French government offered a cash prize of 12,000 francs to anyone who could invent a method to preserve food for soldiers on the move.  After 14 years of experimentation, Appert had developed a process that we now know as canning.

Appert eventually won the cash prize, and his experiments in preserving food helped him developed dried foods including bouillon cubes and powdered milk tablets, paving the way for commercially dried milk powders.

Image:  Nicolas Appert, lithograph by Guffanli courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica

 

In the 1870s, Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter employed the powdered milk developed by his neighbor, Henri Nestlé, to create the first milk chocolate bar.  The two entrepreneurs eventually formed the Nestlé Company.  In 1879, Swiss chocolatier Rodolphe Lindt invented the conching machine.  Still in use today, conching machines employ large rollers to mix and aerate chocolate - leading to the mass production of silky-smooth milk chocolate bars... and the rest is history!

 

Image: Ad from The Philadelphia Inquirer; October 18th, 1926, Page 10

Sources: Science Direct, Encyclopedia Britannica, Smithsonian Magazine, Agriculture Institute, The History Channel, National Geographic, Tufts University European Center, World Agroforestry Centre

 

 

Powdered milk is still manufactured today - here is a 1961 ad for instant powdered milk: