Do you eat 12 pounds of chocolate each year? The average American does! That’s like eating a small bowling ball of chocolate. But people didn’t always munch on chocolate in the same ways we do today. In fact, the sweet history of chocolate didn’t start out sweet at all. And people didn’t eat chocolate. They drank it!

Etymologists (word studiers) think the word “chocolate” comes from the Aztec word “xocolatl.” That’s what Aztecs called a bitter drink they made from cacao beans. They noticed that cacao made them feel better. (As the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “There is nothing new under the sun”!)

But foreigners didn’t agree. They came to the Aztecs’ home in what is now central Mexico in the 1500s. As it turned out, bitter drinking chocolate wasn’t their cup of tea—err—chocolate. The Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes wrote about its taste. He called it “a bitter drink for pigs”! But soon, honey and cane sugar were added to chocolate. Rich people in Europe began to love it. The Europeans built cacao plantations in regions around the equator. Their presence exposed native workers to European diseases. Those workers died. The Europeans replaced them with African slaves.

In 1828, a Dutch chemist invented the cocoa press. The press could squish fatty cocoa butter out of the roasted beans. You would probably recognize the substance it left behind: cocoa powder! The powder could be added to other ingredients and poured into molds. Suddenly, all kinds of people could afford this inexpensively produced chocolate.

As time passed, people worked to make chocolate cheaper and cheaper. Today, the word “chocolate” is used for all kinds of low-cost treats. But sometimes these foods have almost no cacao in them. They are often full of unfamiliar ingredients that produce a flavor similar to chocolate.

That isn’t the end of chocolate’s story though. Many chocolatiers still use high-quality ingredients. They are working to make chocolate better—even if it means making it by hand!