Chocolate Development: The Chocolate Bar

Chocolate goes solid

When we hear the world chocolate today, most of us instantly think of chocolate bars or chocolate pralines. The history of solid chocolate origins back to 1828 when Conrad J. van Houten developed and patented a method for extracting the fat from the cocoa beans and create powdered cocoa and cocoa butter. This inventive Dutchman also found out that if you treat chocolate with an alkalizing agent you can remove the bitter taste, an other crucial step towards the creation of the modern mild flavoured chocolate bar. This process using alkali is still referred to as “Dutch process”. Most historians agree that the first chocolate designed to be eaten, not drunk, was created in 1847 by a young English chocolatier named Joseph Fry. He was the founder of J S Fry & Sons chocolate company. He was soon to be followed by the famous Cadbury brothers; Richard and George, who had inherited a small company specialised in a few colonial products like coffee and tea. The Cadbury brothers developed the company and opened a major cocoa and chocolate factory in Bournville. Bournville is today the name of a dark chocolate bar, still manufactured by Cadbury.

Milk and cocoa – a match made in Switzerland

So far the dark chocolate bars, but what about the sweet, pale milky ones? Well, this part of the history takes us back to 19 th century Switzerland and a candle maker called Daniel Peter. During this time, the use of oil lamp fuel started to really catch on throughout Europe , and Daniel Peter was contemplating his future as a candle manufacturer. Everything turned out to the best, since he fell in love with a girl whose father was no less than François-Louis Cailler, the Swiss chocolate manufacturer who invented the first refiner and perfected the chocolate manufacturing process. Daniel Peter married his beloved and converted his candle manufacturing facility into a chocolate factory. The chocolate business was a highly competitive one, and Daniel Peter started to make chocolate experiments in order to create his own unique kind of chocolate. In 1867 he decided to try to mix chocolate and milk and after eight years of perfecting his product he sold the very first milk chocolate bar.

he toughest problem for Daniel Peter had been to create an efficient technique for the removal of water from the milk, in order to avoid mildewing. Fortunately for Daniel Peter, his neighbour Henry Nestlé had encountered the same problem when he tried to manufacture healthy baby food from milk. By experimenting together, the two neighbours managed to find a solution. When the practical problems were finally solved, Daniel Peter dedicated his time to perfecting his milk chocolate recipe, and soon he started to gain recognition for his delicious and unique products. In 1883 the received a gold medal in Amsterdam and the milk chocolate was by this time famous even outside Europe . In 1901 a principal of the American firm “Lamot, Corliss and Company” on a visit to Europe happened to taste the Gala – a milk chocolate bar sold in England by Daniel Peter. The principal immediately realised its potential, and before long “Lamot, Corliss and Company” started to import vast amounts of Daniel Peters milk chocolate to North America . The Americans took the milk chocolate to their hearts and have never seized to love it – as a matter of fact the formula Daniel Peter created more than a century ago is still used for milk chocolate making today.