95 Facts About Chocolate
1. Chocolate chip cookies are one of the junk foods people binge the most on. The average binge eater gobbles down more than 15 cookies in a session and then feels disgusting.
2. Mexican witch doctors used to use chocolate to treat bronchitis. It was not super effective.
3. Candy cravings can be satisfied by a piece of fruit, but a chocolate craving can only be satisfied with chocolate.
4. The word “chocolate” comes from the Aztec word “xocoatl,” which was a drink they made from cocoa beans and water they got from a river that was probably filled with piranhas. Maybe that’s what killed the Aztecs. The piranhas mutated and grew legs and learned how to talk and then bought up all the real estate and the Aztecs were forced to move east.
5. Baker’s Chocolate is a just brand name. It doesn’t mean the chocolate is only to be used for baking. I don’t know about you that blew my mind right outta my skull. It’s sitting on windowsill now using the binoculars to look for wildlife.
6. A jewel thief in Belgium once got away with $28 million worth of loot because he gained the trust of the guards by repeatedly giving them chocolate.
7. The chocolate chip cookies that Cookie Monster eats on Sesame Street are actually rice cakes with brown paint dots.
8. A standard cocoa bean contains about 300 different flavors.
9. Cocoa trees can grow anywhere it’s hot, humid, and there’s lots of rain. The area near the equator where most cocoa trees grow is called the Chocolate Belt.
10. Aside from Valentine’s Day and Easter, there are several other special days celebrating chocolate. July 7th is the most popular and generic event, Chocolate Day. There’s also National Milk Chocolate Day on July 28th, International Chocolate Day on September 13th, and, National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day on November 7th. I don’t think it would hurt your marriage if you showed up with chocolate on each of these days, although you are committing to a lifetime of remembering random dates.
11. The most expensive bar of chocolate in the world is made by the To'ak Chocolate company and sells for $345 US. It uses the finest cocoa beans stolen by hot air balloon from a vicious Ecuadorian dictator, was aged for 18 months in a 50-year-old French oak Cognac cask.
12. Columbus initially mistook cocoa beans for shriveled almonds, which sounds like a Shakespearian insult for testicles.
13. Raindrops look more like chocolate chips than whatever stupid shape you thought they looked like.
14. A single chocolate chip can give you enough energy to walk 150 feet while thinking to yourself, “I really need to eat less junk food because I’m never gonna burn off that bag of Fudgee-O’s I ate last night watching Disney+ in my underwear.”
15. Researchers have found no link between acne and chocolate. Dark chocolate can actually help your complexion by absorbing UV light and increasing blood flow to the skin, which is the largest organ in your body don’t’cha know?
16. There are three types of cocoa trees. Criollo trees are rare and hard to grow, but produce tastier beans. Forastero trees are the common peasants of the cocoa world, growing like weeds and producing lower quality goods. Lastly there is a genetic abomination called the Trinitario tree which is a combination of both the Criollo and Forastero trees and if it ever becomes self-aware it will probably kill us all.
17. 15% of people say they would rather die than live without chocolate. These people would not do well in the Hunger Games.
18. People suffering from depression eat 55% more chocolate than people who aren’t.
19. From 1932–1945 the 3 Musketeers chocolate bar contained three distinct pieces made of chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, hence the name 3 Musketeers. It was very popular because it was one of the largest chocolate bars you could buy for 5 cents. If you’re wondering how something that used to cost 5 cents now costs like $3 dollars, you should Google: Where does inflation come from?
20. 34% of people will sign up for a credit card in exchange for a chocolate bar.
21. Women who eat a lot of chocolate reportedly have better sex.
22. Chocolate milk was invented in Jamaica by an Irish botanist with a knighthood.
23. The milk in milk chocolate is usually condensed milk. Try putting some condensed milk in your coffee. It’s pretty good. Throw on some CCR and pretend you’re flying low over the jungle in a grey helicopter and keep your eyes peeled for the Viet Cong.
24. Conching is the final stage of chocolate-making. This is a long process where the ingredients are mixed, blended, and aerated. Every chocolate wizard has his own secret conching method.
25. 40% of all the almonds produced in a year are turned into chocolate treats.
26. 66% of the world’s coca is grown in Africa. Half of that is grown in a single country, Ivory Coast. So the next time somebody says, “Who cares about Africa?” you can hit them hit them in the face with this factoid.
27. Yogurt, apple sauce, and the liquid from a can of chickpeas can all be subsumed for eggs in a chocolate chip cookie recipe. Don’t do this unless you’re allergic to eggs or you’re a chicken-hugging vegetarian. It doesn’t taste the same. Applesauce is the worst. It makes your cookies taste like apples. I know this because my twin brother has been allergic to eggs ever since he was sperm. Mom always coddled him by feeding him foods that wouldn’t kill him.
28. Most of the soldiers that stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day had a Hersey’s chocolate bar with them as part of their field rations. It was called the “D ration bar” and was a special bar that provided more energy than your basic chocolate bar and also wouldn’t melt when it got too hot outside. The army told Hersey’s scientists the chocolate bar should “taste a little better than a boiled potato,” so the soldiers would save it for an emergency instead of eating it as a snack. The D rations melted at 120 °F whereas regular chocolate melts around 90 °F. The bars were also packaged in a wrapping that was “poison gas proof.” Many soldiers referred to the D ration as “Hitler’s secret weapon,” and threw the bars away because they were disgusting and caused intestinal problems. In 1957 Hersey’s finally changed the recipe and made it tasty.
29. Hersey’s Kisses were named after the sound the machine makes when chocolate plops out of the funnel and onto the conveyor belt.
30. Cocoa butter is an edible vegetable fat extracted from the cocoa bean. It’s used not only in chocolate treats, but also in massage oils, ointments, and overpriced pharmaceuticals manufactured by villains.
31. If you suffer from migraines, you should avoid chocolate because it might trigger a headache that’ll blow your head off.
32. More than $400 million dollars is spent every year on chocolate in the week leading up to Easter.
33. Blonde chocolate was discovered by accident when a chef left some white chocolate in a bain marie for 10 hours. A bain marie is a container holding hot water into which a pan is placed for slow cooking.
34. German chocolate cake was named after its creator, Sam German, and not the country.
35. In 2015, The International Cocoa Organization forecast that cocoa bean production would fall because of climate change. According to the laws of economics, this should result in chocolate bars going up in price. But who knows? Economics isn’t physics. Sometimes things don’t behave the way they’re predicted to. They don’t call economics “the dismal science” for nothing.
36. Lays sells a flavor of potato chips covered in milk chocolate and they are delicious.
37. The idea for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream was written on a suggestion board by a customer in a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream store. It was me. I travelled back in time and did this for you. As a thank you, you can tell all your friends about GripRoom.
38. Marie Antoinette drank a lot of hot chocolate. Maybe it scrambled her brains so she thought she could get away with telling an angry mob who couldn’t afford any bread that they should just eat cake instead. (This did not work out well for her.)
39. Cocoa beans taste different depending on what part of the world they’re from. Many people in the chocolate industry agree the best beans come from Ecuador. Probably don’t mention this when you’re travelling in Africa.
40. In some Middle East countries chocolate chip cookies are warmed up in the pita bread oven, covered in chocolate sauce, and eaten with a fork and knife.
41. In Japan it is customary for women to gift men a box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day.
42. Personal trainers will sometimes recommend chocolate milk as a post-workout recovery drink. This is because chocolate milk has protein, carbohydrates, calcium, sugar, and sodium. It also tastes pretty good which is better than you can say for some of those protein shakes they hawk at the juice bar.
43. A Hersey’s bar was dug up in the South Pole after being frozen for 60 years. It was still edible but that’s how monster movies start so whoever ate it was a moron.
44. Most cocoa trees are grown on small family farms.
45. During the 1970s, red M&Ms were replaced with orange M&Ms because people thought red food dye gave you cancer. There is still no consensus on whether this is true or not, but red food dye has been shown to cause hyperactivity in children. So if you don’t like your neighbors then feed their kids a lot of red M&Ms and laugh diabolically as their kid is diagnosed with ADHD and they stop showing up to the neighborhood BBQ.
46. Nazis plotted to kill Winston Churchill by sending him an exploding chocolate bar. The idea for the bomb was sketched out on paper but never created because they decided it was stupid.
47. As the popularity of chocolate grew, thousands of people were forced into slavery to farm the cocoa trees.
48. The movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was titled Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a marketing promo for the Wonka Bar, a real chocolate bar made by Quaker Oats
49. The chocolate river in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was made of water, cream, and chocolate. The cream spoiled almost instantly. They had a hard time filming because the river stank so bad.
50. Solid chocolate is a relatively new invention. For thousands of years it was consumed as a liquid.
51. Most chocolate has caffeine in in, so be careful eating too much chocolate after dark or you’ll have problems sleeping. A dark chocolate bar can have more caffeine in it than a cup of coffee.
52. Cocoa beans grow in pods the size of footballs and the footballs hang off the cocoa tree. Inside each pod are about 50 cocoa beans.
53. Chocolate is one of the only high-fat foods that can lower your cholesterol.
54. In Melbourne, Australia, a bunch of weirdos once made a 5,000 pound 10-foot-tall Easter egg. It was probably filled with spiders.
55. Scientists believe people who think they’re allergic to chocolate are actually allergic to the bits of cockroach often found in bars of chocolate. Don’t worry you probably can’t taste the cockroach unless an illegal amount of cockroach parts somehow ended up in your chocolate bar. But that would never happen to you. You’re a lucky person I can tell. I’ve got a sense about these things.
56. In Indonesia there is a 20-foot statue of a pair of hands holding a cocoa pod because cocoa is very important to the local economy. People don’t build enough giant statues these days. I wonder why that is.
57. The smell of chocolate makes some women feel like reading romance books or having sex. I’ve run some experiments on this but so far the results are not great. All the women run away when I throw hot chocolate at their feet.
58. The Mayans were the first people to grow and consume chocolate. The Aztecs were forced to trade for cocoa beans because they couldn’t grow them.
59. Aztec emperor Montezuma drank 50 cups of chocolate every day because he thought it was an aphrodisiac.
60. If you ever find your chocolate covered in white spots, don’t worry that’s not a deadly mold or other such gross and disgusting things. It’s just the fat molecules rising to the surface of the chocolate because it was stored improperly. Chocolate should be stored in an airtight container and hidden in a cool dry place where your spouse won’t find it.
61. Many black-and-white movies used chocolate syrup as fake blood.
62. Women enjoy chocolate almost twice as much as men.
63. The best wine to serve with chocolate is a red wine you didn’t spend too much money on.
64. In what was probably the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever, the woman who invented chocolate chip cookies traded the idea to Nestlé for a lifetime supply of chocolate.
65. Despite eating less chocolate per person than many other countries, Americans consume about 50% of the world’s chocolate.
66. During the chocolate-making process, cocoa beans are roasted just like coffee beans. They can end up lightly roasted, or quite dark. Here’s a factoid on coffee: The darker the roast, the longer it will retain its flavor.
67. Chocolate is one of the only foods that will melt on your tongue or on your skin.
68. Cocoa bean producers are some of the biggest exploiters of child labor in and Ghana Ivory Coast. If this upsets you, you can always switch to fair trade chocolate.
69. Here is the story of how chocolate spread through Europe. Once upon a time during the Spanish Inquisition many Jews were exiled from Spain and brought their chocolate-making secrets to other parts of Europe. The end.
70. If your chocolate bar contains mostly cocoa powder, then your chocolate bar is mostly a vegetable.
71. Former Secretary of State, John Kerry, once owned and operated a successful chocolate chip cookie store. He opened it because he was bored of being a lawyer.
72. Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal likes chocolate chip cookies so much that he ordered his favorite recipe be placed on the Governor’s official website.
73. Dark chocolate can have health benefits if doesn’t have too much sugar in it. Health benefits include: antioxidants, lower blood pressure, fiber, protection from the sun, and improved brain function. You’d be stupid not to eat it.
74. During the American Revolutionary War soldiers were sometimes paid in chocolate. The commanders hoped they would eat it during battle and it would calm their nerves. Also it was cheaper than bags of gold which was probably the real reason. “Hey, buddy, you want a check for 10 dollars or a box of chocolate which is worth, uhh, let’s say 11 dollars?” Not that taking the chocolate was wrong necessarily. A rebel soldier had a 1 in 5 chance of dying of disease, and a 1 in 8 chance of dying in combat. People who don’t think they’re going to live very long often make decisions which they think provide them with the most short-term benefit.
75. The heart-shaped box of chocolate was designed in 1861 as a promotion for Valentine’s Day. (Big fat surprise.)
76. Mayan emperors were often buried with jars of chocolate which seems kind of weird, but better than Egyptian pharaohs who were buried with their cats.
77. The world’s first chocolate bar was produced in 1847 by a man named Joseph Fry in Bristol, England. It was the first factory to mass-produce chocolate bars. Over the next 20 years they created more than 220 different chocolate treats, like Easter eggs, and Fry’s Chocolate Cream bar
78. Countries whose citizens eat the most chocolate per person produce more Nobel winners. My theory is this is because chocolate has caffeine in it, and caffeine makes you smart because you can’t fall asleep so you might as well stay up and learn something.
79. If you eat more than 12 pounds of unsweetened dark chocolate in a single setting you will die. So don’t do that.
80. People in Switzerland eat 22.36 pounds of chocolate per person per year. Americans only eat about 11 pounds.
81. Columbus and Cortez both brought cocoa beans back to Spain, making chocolate one of South America’s first exports.
82. The Milky Way chocolate bar was named after the malted milkshake which was named after the Milky Way Galaxy.
83. One of the largest chocolate factories in Canada, the Hersey factory in Smiths Falls, Ontario, closed in 2010. The facility is now a medical marijuana factory.
84. Whenever cocoa beans have been used as currency, people would create counterfeit beans by painting clay. It’s almost like humans are compelled to counterfeit currency. Stanford should do some research into this. The Stanford currency experiment.
85. Most chocolate bars contain tiny bits of insects that were harvested along with the cocoa. It probably won’t hurt you. Most processed food has insect parts or mouse poop in it. Look it up. This is a real thing. There’s an amount of mouse poop in your cereal the government doesn’t care about. But too much mouse poop and they’ll shut it down. Everything has a limit.
86. A single cocoa tree only produces enough cocoa beans to make about 2 pounds of chocolate per year.
87. Sugar-free chocolate can act as a laxative. Give some to anybody that talks or uses their cell phone during a movie.
88. Cocoa beans were used as currency by some ancient cultures. Like the Aztecs.
89. The guy who created the Reese’s Peanut Butter cup was a dairy farmer who sold milk to the Hersey chocolate company.
90. If your white chocolate doesn’t have at least 20% cocoa butter, 14% total milk solids, and 3.5% milk fat, then it’s not chocolate it’s a scam.
91. More than $120 billion dollars in chocolate treats are sold every year.
92. The cocoa tree is native to South America. How it ended up in Africa is mystery.
93. Nutella was invented when cocoa beans were in short supply due to rationing during World War 2. Also because the creator wanted lots of money. Which is usually the reason most things are invented.
94. The largest chocolate bar ever produced weighed more than 12,700 pounds. It measured 4m by 4m by 0.35m.
95. If you’re removing frozen chocolate from your freezer you should first thaw it by placing it in the fridge for a few hours. Once it’s no longer frozen, remove it from the fridge and put it on a plate somewhere away from sunlight. If you skip the fridge step then condensation will attack your chocolate and make it taste gross.
