In 1687 an English doctor, Sir Hans Sloane was travelling in Jamaica where he tried chocolate, a local drink. He didn’t like it much, but when he added milk to it, he thought it tasted much better.
He brought his milk chocolate recipe back to England, where it was sold as a medicine. The Cadbury Brothers later used his recipe for the milk chocolate drink they produced between 1849 and 1875.
Chocolate was getting more and more popular, and to meet the new demand, cocoa plantations were built in the West Indies, the Far East and Africa. As a result the price of cocoa beans gradually fell – good news for people who wanted to try chocolate who previously could not afford it…
The high import duties on cocoa were reduced in 1853. Transport had become easier too, due to the Industrial Revolution. It meant that now chocolate was available to a large percentage of the population.
With people clamouring for chocolate, interest grew in how it was made. Some of the earliest cocoa makers were apothecaries or chemists, who considered it a kind of medicine. They also had the equipment and skills to heat, measure and blend the ingredients.
‘Both Fry’s of Bristol and Terry’s of York, two well-known names in chocolate, were founded by apothecaries’.
Other cocoa manufacturers began as grocers – like John Cadbury, who started out in 1824 dealing in tea and coffee in his Birmingham shop, and Rowntree's of York, which branched out from the family grocery business.
It was all still about a chocolate drink though – solid ‘eating’ chocolate was not invented until early Victorian times.
Read about the origins of Cadbury Drinking Chocolate