Who made the first chocolate bar, and how did milk join in?

The chocolate bar came first, and milk came much later. In 1847, the Fry's chocolate factory moulded an eating chocolate bar, often considered the first of its kind. It was named Chocolat Délicieux à Manger, and was probably inspired by French chocolates. Fry's was one of three firms, with Cadbury and Rowntree's, founded by Quakers, who were teetotalers and believed chocolate was a good alternative to alcohol. At Fry's, production of eating chocolate rose from about 10 tonnes in 1852 to over 1,100 tonnes in 1880.

Milk was harder. Early attempts failed because the water in milk did not willingly mix with cocoa butter, a fat, and efforts to combine the two produced an oily and milky mess. A Swiss candle-maker turned chocolatier named Daniel Peter fought with the same problem: removing the water from the milk, which caused mildew. Only when he enlisted Henri Nestlé, a baby-food maker who had invented a milk-condensation process, did it work. In 1875, after seven years of effort, Peter combined cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar with condensed milk to make solid milk chocolate.

Oddly, that first milk chocolate was not meant for eating. It was meant for chocolate milk drinks, and milk chocolate as we know it was created about a decade later. In 1887 the first eating milk chocolate brand, Gala Peter, was launched.

Milk won people over because it softened the bitterness and also lowered the cost, since the chocolate needed less cocoa. The first Hershey bar appeared in 1900 and Cadbury Dairy Milk challenged Swiss dominance in 1905, and by 1911 Peter's recipe represented half of the world's chocolate consumption. Milk chocolate became the standard of what the public thought chocolate should be.