Return to articleA CACAO CHRONOLOGY
Critical Moments in the Relationship Between Theobroma cacao and Homo sapiens
ca. 1000 B.C.: The tree’s earliest known name, "kakawa," comes into use among the Olmec, the people of the Mexican Gulf Coast who built the first of the great Mesoamerican civilizations. It is likely that the Olmec are cultivating the tree.
400 B.C.–A.D. 100: The Maya of northern Guatemala adopt the word "cacao" from the Olmec. The tree is presumably coming into cultivation among the Maya as well.
450–500: Clay chocolate-drinking vessels begin to appear among the grave goods of the Maya nobility—strong evidence that chocolate consumption is an important status symbol. (The Maya consumed their chocolate as a foamy liquid often laced with red pepper and other spices.)
ca. 900: By the time classic Maya civilization collapses and the Toltec state emerges, cocoa beans are a major Mesoamerican commodity. Control of the main cocoa growing regions becomes a prime objective in the intermittent warfare that scars the next several centuries. ca. 1500: The Aztec empire, founded in the late 14th century in the area that is now Mexico City, annexes the richest cocoa region in Mesoamerica: Xoconochco (along the Pacific coast of modern Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala).
1521: Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, falls to Hernan Cortes. The conquistadors discover that cocoa beans are in use throughout Mesoamerica as a currency—a practice that is probably many centuries old.
1544: A delegation of Kekchi Maya from Guatemala visits the Spanish court of Prince Philip (later Philip II). Among the gifts are containers of the Mayan chocolate drink— the first recorded appearance of cocoa in the Old World.
1560: The earliest known introduction of cacao into Asia: the tree is brought to the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, from Caracas, Venezuela.
1585: The first official shipment of cocoa beans reaches Seville.
1590: This may be the date at which the Spanish introduce cacao to Africa, by bringing the tree to Fernando Po (now Bioko), an island off the coast of Cameroon. By other accounts, the first African introduction did not occur until 1822, when the tree was established on the island of Príncipe, south of Bioko.
1600–1650: Chocolate becomes a favorite drink of the Spanish court.
ca. 1600: According to some accounts, this is the era in which the Spanish bring cacao to the Philippines, a Spanish colony since 1543. (Other accounts suggest that cacao does not arrive there until 1663.)
1657: London’s first chocolate house opens.
1659: In France, David Chalious is granted a royal monopoly on the production of chocolate, which is acquiring a medical mystique. All sorts of medicinal properties are attributed to it.
1668: Florence, Italy has at least one chocolate house; the chocolate drink has become popular with Florentines who can afford it.
ca. 1680: The French begin major production of cocoa on the Caribbean island of Martinique.
1700–1720: In London, chocolate houses eclipse coffeehouses and taverns as centers for amusement, business, and political debate.
1727: A major blight devastates Trinidad’s cacao plantations, which are planted with a variety of the tree known as criollo, native to southern central America. By the 1750s, Trinidad’s plantations have been replanted with a different variety, forastero, from northern South America. Hybridization of the forastero imports with the criollo blight survivors produces cacao’s only other major variety: the trinitario.
1746: French attempts to break the Spanish dominance of cocoa production bring cacao to the state Bahia, in Brazil (well south of the tree’s native Brazilian range). The transplant is a huge but a delayed success: Bahia becomes a major cocoa-producing region by the end of the 19th century.
1765: Chocolate production begins in North America, with the establishment of a cocoa bean grinding mill in Massachusetts.
1778: The Dutch bring cacao from the Philippines to Jakarta, Sumatra, where they establish a propagation facility that soon leads to major production in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia and Malaysia).
1828: The Dutch chemist Conrad van Hooten patents a technique for pressing most of the fat from roasted and crushed cocoa beans, improving the digestibility of the resulting powder. The addition of alkaline salts makes the powder easier to mix in water. This "Dutch cocoa" permits mass production of cheap chocolate.
1847: The English manufacturer J.S. Fry & Sons uses cocoa powder to create the first successful mass-produced chocolate bar.
1850–1860: The cocoa pod borer, a moth whose larvae infest the cacao fruit, emerges in the Indonesian archipelago. Established plantations are ruined, and production is driven ever further into previously undisturbed forest. The borer remains cacao’s most important insect pest.
1853: The Cadbury family business, which had begun as a tea and coffee shop in Birmingham, becomes purveyor of chocolate to Queen Victoria. Cadbury-Schweppes is now one of the world’s largest chocolate companies.
1879: The first really successful introduction of cacao to the African mainland occurs, when the tree is brought from the island of Fernando Po (now Bioko) to the Gold Coast (now Ghana).
1879: In Switzerland, the chemist Henri Nestlé and the chocolate manufacturer Daniel Peter find a way to mix chocolate with milk—an objective that had frustrated chocolate aficionados for centuries. To overcome the incompatibility between the two substances, they use a low-fat form of chocolate (cocoa powder), and a low water form of milk (condensed milk—an earlier Nestlé invention). The mixture is then enriched with additional cocoa butter and cocoa solids. Milk chocolate is an instant commercial success.
1879: The Swiss chocolate manufacturer Rudolphe Lindt invents the "conch," a machine for stone-grinding chocolate. Because it produces a much finer-grained, more mellow chocolate, conching soon becomes a standard manufacturing process.
1894: Milton Hershey, already the owner of a caramel candy business, founds the Hershey Chocolate Company in Pennsylvania. Like Cadbury-Schweppes and Nestlé, Hershey is today one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world.
1905: Cacao arrives in Côte d’Ivoire, the country that is today the world’s biggest cocoa producer.
1911: The cocoa yield in Ghana approaches 40,000 tons—at the time, a world record national harvest. Cacao, a New World tree, has become primarily an Old World crop. Today, roughly two-thirds of cocoa production is from Africa.
1917: The first reports of a virulent fungal disease called frosty pod rot emerge from Ecuador. The disease, which is currently confined to northern South America and southern Central America, can cause a total collapse of the yield.
ca. 1920: In Minnesota, Frank Mars founds the Mar-O-Bar Company, the precursor of Mars, Inc., another of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturers.
1936: Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus emerges in Ghana and spreads throughout the west African cocoa-producing region during the next two decades. The virus remains the most important pest of cacao in Africa.
1987: Food-Tek, a food chemistry firm in New Jersey, takes out the first patent on an altered molecular structure in cocoa butter. Food-Tek’s invention is the first (reasonably) edible heat-resistant chocolate. A similar invention in the following year, by the Batelle Memorial Research Institute in Switzerland, attracts major industry investment. Heat-resistance is widely regarded as key to boosting chocolate consumption in the tropics and warm temperate regions.
1989: The cacao witches’ broom, a native fungal pest of cacao in Amazonia, is identified in Bahia, Brazil’s main cocoa-producing state. Over the next decade, Brazilian cocoa production drops to one-quarter its previous level. The witches’ broom is currently confined to northern South America and Panama.
2000: In October, a British television documentary ignites a debate on child slavery in the cacao plantations of Côte d’Ivoire, currently the world’s main cocoa producer. According to the program, "up to 40 percent of the chocolate that we eat may be contaminated with slavery." Côte d’Ivoire officials reject the charges; the industry promises to investigate. (Slavery was important in plantation development in both the Old and New Worlds.)
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