Today you can buy a chocolate bar in almost any shop, but for most of history chocolate was not something you ate. It was something you drank.
Chocolate comes from the seeds of the cacao tree, which grows only in hot, wet places near the equator. More than 3,000 years ago, people in Central America and southern Mexico learned to roast these seeds and crush them into a paste. The Maya and later the Aztecs mixed the paste with water, chili and spices. The drink was bitter, not sweet, and cacao seeds were so valuable that the Aztecs used them as money.
In the 1500s, Spanish explorers brought cacao back to Europe. The Spanish added sugar and honey, and hot chocolate soon became a fashionable drink for rich people.
The chocolate bar came much later. In 1847, a British company, J. S. Fry & Sons, found a way to mix cocoa powder, sugar and cocoa butter into a paste that could be pressed into a mold. Milk chocolate followed in Switzerland in the 1870s.
Today most cacao is grown in West Africa, especially in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Some of the farmers who grow it have never tasted the chocolate that is made from their crops.