National Chocolate Day

Today is National Chocolate Day. Here are some interesting chocolate facts to help you celebrate:

Hershey’s produces over 80 million chocolate Kisses--every day.

The English chocolate company Cadbury made the first chocolate bar in the world in 1842.

In 1875, Swiss Daniel Peter discovered a way of mixing condensed milk, manufactured by his friend Henri Nestlé, with chocolate to create the first milk chocolate.

The first chocolate chip cookie was invented in 1937 by Ruth Wakefield who ran the “Toll House Inn.” The term “Toll House” is now legally a generic word for chocolate chip cookie. It is the most popular cookie worldwide and is the official cookie of Massachusetts.

In 2002, Marshall Field’s in Chicago made the largest box of chocolate. It had 90,090 Frango mint chocolates and weighed a whopping 3,326 pounds.

The largest chocolate bar ever manufactured was in Italy in 2000. The bar had a weight of 5,000 lbs.

Every second, Americans collectively eat one hundred pounds of chocolate.

The Snickers bar was named after a horse the Mars family owned.

Percy Spence, a scientist working on WWII radar and weapons projects, happened to be a big fan of chocolate. After spending some time near a formidable device called a magnetron, he noticed the chocolate bar he’d been keeping in his pocket had turned to mush. He quickly put two and two together and realized magnetrons might be able to heat up food at incredibly fast rates, and voilà, the microwave oven was born.

The word “chocolate” comes from the Aztec word “xocoatl,” which referred to the bitter, spicy drink the Aztecs made from cacao beans.

The inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, Ruth Wakefield, sold her cookie recipe to Nestle in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate.