It’s funny how attitudes change. When chocolate arrived in Great Britain it was promoted as a health drink. Today we are warned against consuming too much in an attempt to prevent obesity, so in love are we with the brown stuff.

Chocolate is produced from the seeds – or beans – of the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, which literally means ‘the food of the gods.’ The first people to produce chocolate, originally as a drink, were the farmers of the rainforests of the Amazon River Basin and in the foothills of the Venezuelan and Colombian Andes. They discovered that as the beans rotted they smelt rather delicious and they learned to ‘capture’ this aroma by drying and then roasting the beans before grinding them into a paste. It was this paste, mixed with water, that became the first chocolate drink which they called chocol haa.

According to historian Paul Chrystal (author of Chocolate, the British Chocolate Industry, Shire Books, 2011), ‘It was Montezuma II (reigned 1502-20) who really exploited the fiscal power of chocolate: he adopted cacao into currency in place of gold, established a bean bank and allowed tribute to be paid in cocoa beans … Indeed, Montezuma reputedly drank 50 cups of chocolate every day because he believed it to be an aphrodisiac, thus helping to establish chocolate’s pseudo-medical and sexual reputation.’

So, when did this exciting commodity reach our shores? Following the defeat of Montezuma by the Spanish conquistadores – seeking El Dorado but, instead, finding chocolate – it swiftly became a delicacy at the Spanish Royal Court. Within a hundred years it was being drunk by the elite throughout Europe and in 1657 the first London chocolate house, in Queen’s Head Alley, opened its doors.

Dr Matthew Green, writing in the Daily Telegraph in March 2017 observed, ‘For a city with little tradition of hot drinks (coffee had only arrived five years earlier), chocolate was an alien, suspect substance associated with popery and idleness (ie France and Spain); a market had to be generated. Within the next decade, a slew of pamphlets appeared proclaiming the miraculous, panacean qualities of the new drink, which would boost fertility, cure consumption, alleviate indigestion and reverse aging: a mere lick, it was said, would “make old women young”.’ And with such inducements, chocolate houses were swiftly established. For Samuel Pepys, chocolate was the perfect cure for a hangover.

Chocolate today is more usually enjoyed in its solid form. ‘It was Joseph Fry & Sons of Bristol who led the way when, in 1761, Fry bought a watermill and warehouse and established a sales agency network in 53 English towns,’ says Chrystal. ‘In 1795, Fry effectively industrialised chocolate production in England when he started using a James Watt steam engine to grind his beans.’

And then in 1828 Dutch chemist and confectioner, Coenraad van Houten, developed and patented an hydraulic press which squeezed out most of the cocoa butter from the liquor, thus reducing the cocoa butter content from over 50 per cent to 27 per cent and leaving chocolate powder or, as we know it, cocoa.

Unfortunately, the manufacture of drinking chocolate created up to 30 per cent discarded cocoa butter. ‘The solution to the problem of this wastage was to make it into eating chocolate and Joseph Fry & Sons was again a pioneer. It had been making drinking chocolate since 1728 and in 1847 it developed an eating chocolate in bar form by adding some of the cocoa butter back into the mix, producing a thinner paste that was easier to mould,’ says Chrystal.

Where Fry and Sons led, others followed. In 1875 Swiss chocolatier Henri Nestle invented milk chocolate, and four years later, Rodolphe Lindt created a machine that would transform the texture of chocolate, making it velvety smooth.

It comes as little surprise that the pioneers of Britain’s chocolate industry were Quakers, the hot chocolate beverage being promoted as an alternative to the demon drink. Other Quaker chocolate families were Cadbury’s of Bournville, and both Rowntree’s and Terry’s of York. With their Quaker associations their confections were viewed as trustworthy.

Of these chocolate families, perhaps Cadbury is the most famous. ‘The Cadbury story starts in 1824,’ says Chrystal, ‘with John Cadbury, son of a rich Quaker, selling non-alcoholic beverages – tea, coffee and sixteen varieties of drinking chocolate – at 93 Bull Street, Birmingham.’ John’s sons joined the company and by 1878, with business booming, a 14.5-acre site close to the Worcester and Birmingham Canal was purchased, and Bournville was the name adopted for the site.

Not only was a factory erected, but also a model village was built to accommodate the workforce, this project known as the Factory in a Garden. Within seven years the new village comprised 313 clean and sanitary houses (complete with front and back gardens) on 330 acres of land. As well as these homes for the workforce, outside the factory gates were parks, a cricket pitch and a library. Residents were provided with a booklet laying down the rules for keeping houses and gardens in good order, abstaining from alcohol on the Sabbath, and the advantages of single beds for married couples. Indeed, Cadbury was one of the first companies in Britain to introduce half-day holidays. ‘Philanthropy and paternalism continued in the workplace with ground-breaking pensions schemes, a sick club, medical services, outings, in-service education, staff committees (the Works Council) and reasonable wages,’ says Chrystal.

Advances in technology meant that powdered milk was eventually replaced in 1905 by fresh milk and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk was launched, a product still being sold today. I certainly remember the advert claiming that ‘a glass and a half of fresh milk’ went into every bar. One staggering statistic is that Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, introduced in 1923 (1963 in their current form), are being ‘laid’ at the rate of 66,000 every hour.

The Rowntree story begins with a woman called Mary Tuke, a member of a famous Quaker family whose grandfather, so Chrystal tells us, ‘was jailed for his nonconformism in the 1660s’. When aged only 30 (in 1725) Mary established a grocery business in York. The family were good friends of fellow Quaker, Joseph Rowntree I, and in 1862, Joseph’s son, Henry Isaac Rowntree bought the Tukes’ business, to be joined in 1869 by his brother, Joseph Rowntree II.

One area in which Fry and Cadbury were ahead of the game, though, was in advertising, while Joseph Rowntree considered this ‘puffery’, preferring to allow the quality of the goods to speak for themselves. The result was that none of Rowntree’s lines was particularly successful, and although between 1870 and 1879 sales rose, few of them turned a profit. However, they had a new product, fruit pastilles, and their success enabled Joseph to invest in new machinery – namely the aforementioned Van Houten press – and this was followed by the purchase of a 20-acre site for the building of a new factory.

The British had certainly developed a taste for chocolate, and by the turn of the 19th century, employees at the Rowntree factory exceeded 1600. Similarly, to Cadbury at Bourneville, Joseph Rowntree built the community of New Earswick, York, housing both workers and managers, in a village setting. The planner was Raymond Unwin and the architect Barry Parker, who designed the garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City. Rents were kept low but they still provided a modest commercial return on Rowntree’s capital investment.

The first real success for Rowntree was Aero, an aerated rather than a solid chocolate bar. And at a time when motor cars were becoming more affordable, Rowntree’s Milk Motoring chocolate, containing almonds and raisins, was advertised with the slogan ‘You can’t go without it!’.

A competitor to Rowntree in the city of York, Joseph Terry had by the 1920s become the market leader not in bars of chocolates, but in chocolate assortments. In 1823 Joseph Terry (born in 1793) married Harriet Atkinson, whose family ran a small confectionary business which Joseph subsequently joined, forming a partnership with his brother-in-law, George. When George left the business in 1826 Joseph began to develop new products which were eventually delivered to 75 towns throughout England. These Quakers were nothing if not entrepreneurial! Chocolate production ‘began in earnest in around 1867’, says Chrystal, ‘with 13 chocolate products… adding to the other 380 or so confectionary and parfait lines’.

In 1926 the company moved to purpose-built Chocolate Works in Bishopthorpe Road, which today has a new lease of life as a care village. The famous Chocolate Orange started life as a Chocolate Apple and reputation has it that by the 1950s one Christmas stocking in ten contained a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

Each of these chocolate families had entrepreneurial spirit, continually seeking new markets and welcoming the latest technology in order to aid and speed production, and they understood the zeitgeist of the day: that people’s passion for chocolate, already centuries old by the time Fry, Cadbury, Rowntree and Terry set up their manufactories, showed no sign of abating.