The first chocolate making factory was built by Fry in the UK, who was a doctor and needed to keep up with the demand for medicinal chocolate prescriptions!
Quaker grocery store owner John Cadbury started manufacturing chocolate for his customers in 1824. This chocolate was still quite coarse, grainy and acidic.
The 19th Century marked three more revolutionary developments in the history of chocolate:
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In 1847, an English company introduced solid "eating chocolate" through the development of fondant chocolate, a smooth and velvety variety that has almost completely replaced the old coarse grained chocolate which formerly dominated the world market.
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The second development occurred in 1876 in Vevey, Switzerland, when Daniel Peter devised a way of adding milk to the chocolate, creating the product we enjoy today known as milk chocolate.
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The third development is responsible for the taste and mouth feel we so adore when eating chocolate. This is through a technique called conching developed by Swiss born Rudolphe Lindt in 1879. This technique mixes the chocolate over a period of days to refine the solid particles; cacao solids and sugar, to a much smaller size, and in the same process releases all the volatile oils that cause bitterness.
After Lindt discovered this process called conching the experience of chocolate changed for ever. Now chocolate had acquired the divinely smooth, luxuriously melting mouth feel of fine chocolate that we so adore today...
