With Valentine’s Day this week we wanted to share with you the world’s favorite candy to give as a gift. Chocolate! This Valentine’s Day you can count on seeing heart shaped peanut butter cups, heart shaped milk chocolate, pink and red wrapped Hershey’s Kisses and heart shaped boxes filled with a variety of chocolates. Altogether there will be millions of pounds of this candy sold for billions of dollars. I don’t know about you but I love to get chocolate as a gift no matter what holiday it is. So just what is the obsession with this confection about? And how did chocolate become the world’s favorite candy? 

 Chocolate is grown on trees in the equatorial regions around the world. The tree has beautiful star-shaped flowers that develop into a large seed pod. Each pod has 50-60 seeds. The seeds are what is used to make the chocolate we know and love.  Cultivation seems to have originated in Central and South America and there is evidence that it was used in rituals by the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs as long as 3000 years ago. When the Europeans started exploring the “new world" they were introduced to chocolate. 

You would never believe that your candy bar and science have a shared history but they do. Chocolate was so popular in the 18th and 19th centuries that new inventions were created just to speed up chocolate processing. Chemists and engineers have worked side by side to improve this popular treat. These new inventions led to the creation of chocolate bars and some huge corporations that are still around today. Rudolphe Lindt, John Cadbury, Franklin Mars, Henri Nestle and Milton Hershey are all names that have a place in the development of commercial chocolate consumption. These companies make milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate in every shape and size. We see them in almost every store we go into. However, there are some smaller companies that claim to offer better chocolate confections. One company out of Ecuador sells a candy bar for $600.00. 

The Mars company may be the number one chocolate manufacturer but Milton Hershey definitely takes the cake for determination. He not only built a chocolate factory but also built an entire town around it so his employees would have a place to shop, go to school and houses to live in. He and his wife couldn’t have children so they started a school for orphaned boys. Today if you visit Hershey Pennsylvania you can go to an amusement park, visit the chocolate factory, see a concert or watch a hockey game. Even with all of this the company still makes 70 million Hershey Kisses every day. That is tons of kisses to give and eat on Valentine's Day and every other day of the year.