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The history of chocolate bars, or candy bars, is part of the evolution of the history of chocolate, a commodity that dates back to the ancient Aztecs and Maya of Mexico and Central America (See History of Chocolate on this website’s Home Page).
Up to and including the 1800’s, chocolate was sold in loose pieces by weight. The modern chocolate bar was essentially a means of packaging chocolate more efficiently and conveniently for the consumer and the chocolate retailer alike.
The production of the first commercial chocolate bar, or candy bar, with machinery, is attributed, by people familiar with the history of chocolate, to Milton Hershey when he went into production with the Hershey bar in 1900. Early chocolate bars were generally made with bittersweet chocolate.
40,000 different chocolate bars
The 1920’s are generally considered to have been the “high point” of the chocolate bar era in terms of the number of companies making them, and there were said to be as many as 40,000 different chocolate bars on the market at that time.
Gradually however, the history of chocolate bars was much like other consumer products – large companies began to buy out the smaller ones and the industry consolidated into mostly large manufacturers such as Nestle, Hershey, Cadbury-Schweppes and Lowney.
Today, although the number of chocolate bar manufacturers has dwindled, there are nevertheless a large number of different types of chocolate bars on the market to suit virtually everyone’s taste.
If interested in this topic, you might want to visit the Hersheys Website