From the 10th-16th October 2016, it’s National Chocolate Week, when chocoholics rejoice as the UK celebrates all things cocoa. You might think that living a healthy lifestyle means sacrificing your chocolate fix, but here at Exante, we’ve got you covered.
10 Delicious Chocolate Facts
1. Chocolate is basically a vegetable.
Well, kind of. Both milk and dark chocolate come from the cacao bean which grows on the theobroma cacao (that’s the cacao tree to me and you). The beans are dried, cleaned and roasted before being cracked open. The cacao nib is then removed from the bean, ground up and melted into a liquor before being processed into cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
Milk chocolates are then mixed with sugar and milk or cream to make the sweeter and creamy taste.
2. The first commercial chocolate bar came from Bristol.
In 1842 Fry & Son’s, later known as Cadbury’s made a ‘chocolate delicieux a manger’, the worlds first molded chocolate bar. The bar was extremely bitter though, and it took a further 33 years before Swiss manufacturer Daniel Peter added milk to the recipe and thus milk chocolate was born.
3. The chocolate river in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was FAKE
Back in 1971, set designers mixed 15,000 gallons of water with food colouring, cocoa powder and cream to recreate a real-time Umpa-Loompa land. After a few days the cream spoiled and the smell was quite awful.
4. The Worlds largest chocolate bar weighed over 912 stone
It was made in October 2011 by the English Chocolatiers Thorntons to celebrate their 100th birthday. The bar was nearly 13ft long and 13 ft wide and measured nearly 1ft in height. The bar was later broken up and given out in stores throughout the country for shoppers to enjoy a little taste of history.
5. The inventor of the chocolate chip cookie sold her cookie recipe to Nestle for $1
American Ruth Wakefield , who ran the legendary Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, developed the first ever chocolate chip cookie recipe in her own kitchen and sold them as an accompaniment to ice cream.
They were so popular that she sold the rights to the recipe and the Toll House name to Nestlé for one dollar, which she later claimed she never received, although she did admit the company sent her free chocolate for life.
6. The biggest seller of chocolate in the world is actually an airport
Brussels Airport to be exact, selling a reported 800 tonnes of chocolate every year to passengers passing through (that’s a staggering 1.5kg every minute).
7. You can die from eating too much chocolate
In high quantities, chocolate contains toxic levels of theobromine, a powerful stimulant of the central nervous system. Theobromine poisoning can cause heart failure, seizures, acute kidney damage and dehydration.
You’d have to eat 22lb of the stuff to reach anything near the fatal level (that’s about 40 bars) so don’t panic just yet!
8. The worlds most popular chocolate bar…
Is Snickers with global annual sales of $2 billion. Invented by Mars in 1942 and named after the families favourite race horse, the bar has inspired many popular spin off’s including Snicker ice cream and even a high-protein bar.
9. America is the worlds largest consumer of chocolate
The US consumes nearly 50% of the planets overall chocolate consumption. Europeans come 2nd with nearly 40%.
10. You don’t have to give up chocolate to live a healthy lifestyle
Here at Exante, we’ve got a range of delicious chocolate flavours from shakes, to bars and even gooey desserts.