The Real Inventors of Milk Chocolate Were Not Swiss

The Real Inventor Wasn’t Hans Sloane Either

If you ask almost anyone who invented milk chocolate, you’ll probably hear one of two names.

Daniel Peter. The Swiss chocolatier who commercialised milk chocolate in 1875.

Or Hans Sloane. The Irish physician who supposedly “invented” milk chocolate after visiting Jamaica in the late seventeenth century.

Both stories are neat and both are wrong.

The history of chocolate has a habit of celebrating the people who patented, sold or industrialised an idea, while forgetting the people who actually created it and milk chocolate is perhaps the greatest example of this.

Because almost two hundred years before Daniel Peter produced his famous bars in Switzerland, and years before Hans Sloane ever stepped foot in Jamaica, enslaved communities on the island were already preparing chocolate with milk as part of their everyday lives.

History just haven’t given them the credit.

The Hans Sloane Myth

The traditional story goes something like this. Hans Sloane travelled to Jamaica in 1687 as physician to the Governor. While there, he supposedly disliked the bitter taste of chocolate and decided to mix it with milk.

On returning to England, the story continues, this recipe eventually became the foundation of Cadbury, Nestlé and the modern milk chocolate industry. It sounds like an attractive story. A brilliant European doctor, a simple discovery and an invention that changed chocolate forever.

But the problem is that the historical evidence tells a different story. Sloane actually never claimed to have invented milk chocolate. He just documented what he observed. And what he observed was that enslaved communities were already drinking chocolate made with milk – for survival, not for enjoyment.

The Evidence Appears Before Sloane

So what’s more interesting is that we don’t even need to rely on Hans Sloane. A physician named William Hughes was writing in Jamaica roughly a decade before Sloane arrived. He wrote in his journal published, The American Physitian (1672), that enslaved people were using local methods of preparing chocolate.

Enslaved people from Africa survived on a largely African diet during their horrific passages from the African continent. Food like millets, yams, plantains and cowpeas. Leftover grains would become a potential source of seed stock. This would allow enslaved people to cultivate these crops in the Americas.

Slave owners did not feed their workforce. Enslaved people were not only forcibly put to work, but they also were responsible for their own survival. John H. Parry, the historian recognised this, and noted of the arrival of new groups in the Caribbean, “All these people had to be fed.” The plantation owners would sometimes supply salted fish and grains to sustain their workforce. But it was not enough to live off.

Scarcity of food was one of the common experiences enslaved labourers suffered through on the island.1 Once on the plantations or “colonies”, they had to rely on foraging, planting and risking punishment to support themselves.

Some of the foods and goods that enslaved people enjoyed and cultivated for themselves were the basis for their popularity in the global market. For example, Tobacco was not always sold for profit, Africans and Amerindians grew it for their own consumption.

This was a time of integration – European crops were planted

with Mesoamerican foods, and Mesoamerican with African.

Their plots were an amal­gamation of tropical plants brought from Africa like yams, okra, dasbeen, pigeon peas, guinea corn). As well as including several originally from Asia (banana, citrus, ginger), and plants borrowed in the early years from surviving Carib and Ara­wak indigenous people (maize, peppers, pumpkins, christophenes, sweet potato, cassava, beans, arrowroot, pineapple, edible canna lily, and some European plants adapted to tropical conditions (cabbage, carrots, onions, thyme, rosemary, shallots).3

Among these was cacao.

Knowledge of cacao had a special weight to it.

In early accounts of cacao – it was seen as a survival food. An “Amerindian” miracle substance that helped new arrivals adapt to the Jamaican climate to avoid illness. It’s properties of being highly energising where incredibly valuable in a time of scarcity.

Central American indigenous people who were enslaved in Jamaica used cacao to help them survive the harsh environments of slavery. Henry Stubbe observed that:

“[T]he Indians by the help of Cacao nuts alone do subsist all day, notwithstanding their great labour, and heat.”4

So while, enslaved African people would not have been familiar with cacao, their work alongside Amerindian workers, and their task to look after the cacao plantations would have illuminated the highly prized properties of cacao.

Along with this, there was a growing level of resistance already building in the hills of Jamacia. In the late 17th century – the number of “maroons” (Spanish ex-slaves) gained their freedom as the Spanish had to flee the Island after the English conquest.

They were able to establish free communities and sustain themselves on local plants and foodstuffs. This knowledge was threatening to the English – as while they were struggling to cultivate the cacao and other Mesoamerican foods, there was a growing society in the mountains who already understood it well.

There is evidence that cacao was one of the plants that Maroons utilised to survive in the mountains. William Hughes, a physician, claimed that “Maroonoes, Hunters, and such as have occasion to travel the Country” carried “Balls or Lozanges finely made up with Cacao”.5

And this cacao lasted a long time, in that it “may be kept a fortnight, a moneth, a quater, or half a year: nay, it may be indifferently kept a whole year”.6 A completely valuable asset for people living in a state of survival.

For those enslaved people who were not yet liberated, the chocolate drink was their lifeline to survival throughout the day. Chocolate drinks were said to have been drunk by “all the common people and servants also, before they go forth to work in the plantations…for better support of Nature in their hard labour”.

Though Hans Sloane is often credited for inventing milk chocolate, he actually observed the enslaved people in Jamacia making their own milk chocolate drinks.

Hughes was in Jamacia about 10 years before Hans Sloane, and he observes that many of the local communities took “milk and water”, and when it boileth, they in grated chocolate and cafawder thicken it.”

So cacao was a means to an end to both survive the harsh day-to-day life of slavery.

But it was also a vessel to thrive, a cross-cultural transfer of knowledge from Mesoamerican enslaved people to African enslaved communities.

A shared knowledge that resulted in the invention of milk chocolate.

Knowledge Travels

One of the most remarkable parts of Jamaica’s chocolate history is how many cultures contributed to it. Cacao itself came from Mesoamerica. Indigenous peoples already understood how to prepare it. Central American Indigenous people who were enslaved in Jamaica carried this knowledge with them.

African communities, forced into the same plantations, learned alongside them. European observers then documented what they saw.

Milk itself was already familiar in European food culture. Chocolate preparation belonged to Indigenous America.

The resulting drink was neither entirely European nor entirely Indigenous. It was new. It was a product of cultural exchange under unimaginably brutal circumstances.

The invention of milk chocolate was generations of practical experimentation.

Why Switzerland Gets the Credit

So where does Daniel Peter fit into the story? Daniel Peter absolutely transformed chocolate. His achievement was creating a stable solid milk chocolate bar that could be manufactured commercially using condensed milk.

That innovation changed the confectionery industry forever. But commercialising something is not the same as inventing it.

It’s the difference between inventing bread and opening the first bakery. Peter deserves enormous credit for industrial milk chocolate.

Just not for the first person who thought of mixing chocolate and milk.

Written by Kitty Nason

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