Chocolate has been around for thousands of years in the form of cocao. Cocoa may have been discovered up to 4000 years ago in the Amazon. But the first people to have made chocolate from cocoa were located in Mexico and Central America. These included the Maya and the Aztec, and they mixed ground cacao seeds with different seasonings to make a spicy drink that was not very sweet.

The cocoa tree was called cacahuaquchtl, which mens tree, by the Maya. And the word chocolate comes from the Maya word xocoatl which means bitter water. So chocolate was not, at first, anything even resembling sweet. Sugar and milk mixed into chocolate didn’t come along until much later.

Cocoa pods were a symbol of life and fertility to the Maya, and this was of critical importance to their culture. They used many stones to carve pictures of
cocoa pods in their palaces and temples.

It was Cortez, when he visited South America, who found that mixing sugar with cocoa actually made a wonderful treat. From there on out the history of chocolate changed and evolved over time as people considered it a delicacy and it’s popularity soared around the world.

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