ChocoLAte: From Beans to Bliss
Explore the stories of community and connections through the lens of chocolate in Los Angeles.
Chocolate is the great cultural unifier. The enchanting power of chocolate traverses generational, geographic, and social boundaries. Chocolate’s dynamic ability to bring different groups of people together is what makes its presence so special in a city as famous for its diversity as Los Angeles. Click here to explore the Chocolate: From Beans to Bliss homepage.
Explore some of the chocolate shops and chocolatiers featured in ChocoLAte: From Beans to Bliss using the map below.
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Uncle Eddie's Vegan Cookies
An Uncle Eddie’s cookie embodies not only a delicious treat, but also reflects founders Robbie and Jeffrey Jacobs' insistence that their company is run sustainably with love and respect for all living beings.
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Sad Girl Creamery
Sad Girl Creamery, founded by SueEllen Mancini, focuses on recreating Latin-themed desserts served alongside a heaping scoop of raising mental health awareness. Her pints can be found in several grocery stores in Los Angeles.
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Mignon Chocolates
Joe Ter-Poghossians continues the legacy of Mignon Chocolates, a family business that dates back to the early 20th century. Mignon Chocolates is a staple of the Armenian community, and has locations in both Glendale and Old Town Pasadena.
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Albert's Petite Sweets
Albert Daniels' path to chocolate stardom has been anything but linear. Initially a personal trainer, Albert started out by making cake-pops as a thank you gift for his clients. He loved the joy it brought them and realized this was his true passion. Albert’s inspiring story highlights the triumph of passion over adversity and of creativity over the routine.
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Chocovivo
Chocovivo is a chocolate shop founded by Patricia Tsai. Patricia was a CPA-turned-chocolatier whose business focuses on bean-to-bar chocolate products, with ingredients sourced from communities in Mexico with whom Chocovivo maintains close and strong ties. Chocovivo also dedicates its resources to expanding knowledge of the holistic and healing powers of chocolate.
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Heidi Lucero
Heidi Harper Lucero, culture bearer for the Acjachemen and Ohlone tribes, shares her knowledge of traditional indigenous foodways in the Edible Gardens of the Natural History Museum. Heidi's work can be found in the book Cooking the Native Way , published in collaboration with the Chia Cafe Collective.
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Guelaguetza
Siblings Fernando, Bricia, and Paulina Lopez run Guelaguetza, one of the most storied restaurants in the country. Their Oaxacan cuisine, especially their mole, is known the world over for its quality of ingredients and authentic cooking style.
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Edelweiss Chocolates
Danny Zahir, Creative Director of Edelweiss Chocolates in Los Angeles, continues a sweet legacy dating back to 1942. From its Hollywood heyday, Edelweiss has been an iconic confectionery. With recipes and equipment tracing back 82 years, Danny and his family infuse their own cultural touch, offering delights like the Dark Chocolate Rose Marshmallow, a nod to their heritage with the subtle fragrance of rose water. In the heart of Beverly Hills, Edelweiss Chocolates stands as a timeless blend of tradition and innovation, crafting small batches of delectable chocolates for a new generation of enthusiasts.
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Providence Restaurant
Mac Daniel Dimla of Providence Restaurant takes bean-to-bar chocolate to a whole new level, crafting confections with a passion as rich as the cocoa he sources. His commitment to sustainability is as impressive as his chocolate artistry, as he leads the charge with a zero-waste chocolate program. With each bite, indulge in guilt-free pleasure, knowing you're savoring a taste of the future where every cocoa bean is cherished and the planet is treated as sweetly as his creations.
It Starts with a Seed
The global history of chocolate begins with a seed. Specifically, the seed of the Theobroma cacao tree. Theobroma, the name ascribed to the cocoa tree by Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, is Greek for “Food of the Gods." This godly association with cocoa predated the 18th-century Linnaeus by millennia, with its mythic properties first having been divined by the ancient inhabitants of Mesoamerica. Analyses of trace chemicals on excavated ceramic vessels prove that Mesoamericans have been consuming chocolate since at least 1500 BCE. Long before it became the global commodity we know today, the story of chocolate began as one more closely aligned with the spiritual realm, rather than the earthly one.
Seed pods of the cocoa tree. Credit: Luisovalles used under Creative Commons Attributes License
The Shape of Early Chocolate Consumption
Image of a woman frothing a chocolate drink, from the 16th century Codex Tudela. Image credit: Public Domain .
The cocoa tree is endemic to Central American tropical rainforests. The first users of the cocoa tree processed the seed pods in a way very similar to how chocolate is still used in rural indigenous communities in Central America. First, the football-shaped seed pods are removed from the tree. Then, the pods are split open, with cacao seeds nestled safely in columns within a skin of white pulp. Once extracted from the pod, the seeds and the pulp are left to ferment for approximately three days, then dried in the sun. After drying comes roasting, where the seeds are toasted over a ceramic griddle. Finally, after the thin husk of the seed and pulp are removed, it is ground on a stone metate until it transmutes into a semi-liquid paste. The paste is left to harden, after which point chunks of solid chocolate are able to be used in the making of drinking chocolate. The processing of chocolate was a time and labor-intensive process. The amount of resources needed to process the seeds made drinking chocolate only accessible to the upper echelon of ancient Mesoamerican societies. However, the chocolate drunk by the elites of ancient Mesoamerica was very different from modern forms of “hot chocolate” or “cocoa." Small chunks of the solid chocolate were mixed with water, then the water was poured from a vessel held at standing height into a vessel placed on the ground. This natural aeration of the liquid created a head of chocolate foam in the vessel. As evidenced from numerous Mesoamerican codices, it was this foam that was the most sacred part of the cacao drink. Explore the map below to learn more about chocolate’s ritual, economic, and social importance to the people of ancient Mesoamerica.
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Olmec Brews and Theobromine Clues
The Olmecs are the earliest known civilization to have developed in Mesoamerica, between 1200 and 400 BC, and primarily between the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmecs left behind no written history, but rather a rich material legacy. They were the first society known to have processed and drunk cacao. Chemical analyses of Olmec pottery at the San Lorenzo site in Veracruz, Mexico, revealed traces of theobromine, a chemical present in processed cacao.
Image credit: Public Domain
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Gateway to the Gods
This Maya glyph from Campeche, Mexico, from 600-900 AD, depicts a man holding a cacao pod. Campeche, in what is now Mexico, was once an epicenter of a Maya chocolate monopoly. The Mayas, like the Olmecs before them, were inheritors of a rich tradition of revering cacao as a gateway to the gods. According to the Popol Vuh, a 16th-century K'iche' Maya cosmology, cacao was present at the dawn of creation as a sustaining food of the gods.
Image credit: The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, Anthropology Collections
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Fish and Glyphs
This Classical Period Maya cup, dating from between 600-900 AD, features a series of fish glyphs along the upper register of the vessel. The fish glyph is a phonetic representation of the word kakaw, indicating that this is a vessel used for chocolate.
Image credit: The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, Anthropology Collections
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Tasty Tribute
This Aztec statue dating from between 1440-1521 AD shows a man holding a cacao pod. This statue is unique because of its secular nature and may represent a cacao merchant, or a person offering cacao as tribute. According to Chocolate: Pathway to the Gods by Meredith Dreiss and Sharon Greenhill, "Cacao first appeared within the Aztec provinces as a luxury trade item..." (98). Cacao flowed into the major Aztec provinces, like Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City) through trade routes that extended throughout Mesoamerica.
Image credit: Aztec. Man Carrying a Cacao Pod, 1440-1521. Volcanic stone, traces of red pigment, 14 1/4 x 7 x 7 1/2in. (36.2 x 17.8 x 19.1cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 40.16. Creative Commons-BY (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 40.16_front_PS9.jpg)
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Cacao Currency
This page from the Codex Mendoza details tribute paid to the Aztec king Moctezuma by subjugated provinces located in modern-day Chiapas, Guererro, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Puebla. The two bundles next to the jaguar skins represent five loads of cacao each. Each load of cacao contained 24,000 beans."If a subjugated province did not grow cacao, the cacao for tribute payments had to be obtained elsewhere" (Dreiss and Greenhill, 99).
Image Credit: Codex Mendoza, Public Domain
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Food of the Gods
Cacao was inseparable from its close association with the pantheon of Mesoamerican deities. Here, the rain god Chac and the moon goddess IxChel exchange cacao to bolster their cosmic alliance. Between them is a pot incised with two cacao glyphs. This image is from the Madrid Codex, one of the few surviving pre-conquest Maya codices in existence.
Image credit: Madrid Codex, Public Domain
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A Sip of History
This chocolate pot is on display in the Museum's Becoming Los Angeles exhibit. People living on the rachos in early 19th-century Los Angeles would often enjoy a frothed-chocolate drink, made with cacao imported from Mexico.
The State of Chocolate Today
In the days of the Olmecs, Aztecs, and Mayas, cacao was revered for its monetary and divine value. Cacao drink was bitter, cold, and highly exclusive. So how did it become the billion-dollar commodity we know today? The Spanish brought cacao back to Spain after the violent conquest of the Americas. In Spain it was mixed with sugar and other spices to lessen its bitterness. The delicacy remained exclusive to high Spanish society. As the 17th century progressed, chocolate permeated out of Spain and into England and France, entering onto the menus of tony communal coffee and chocolate houses. From there, several advancements in the chocolate manufacturing process contributed to the explosion of chocolate’s dominance over the candy market. Invariably, as more money began to be made from the consumption of chocolate, so too did the prevalence of inequitable labor practices. Explore our final map to learn more about how the state of chocolate became what it is today.
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Sugar and Slavery
Sugar was used by Europeans to sweeten their chocolate drinks. By the 18th century, sugar was one of England's largest cash crops. European plantation owners forced the indigenous populations of the West Indies, the Caribbean Islands, and Central and South America to toil unendingly in the fields. This labor force was supplanted with thousands of enslaved Africans, stolen from Africa, and transported to the Americas in brutal conditions. Disease, death, and suffering provided for the raw cacao and sugar that made its way to Europe and the American colonies.
Image credit: Slaves cutting the sugar cane, plate IV of the series "Ten Views in the Island of Antigua" by William Clark, London, 1823. Public Domain .
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The Pressure is On
In 1828, Dutch inventor Coenraad Van Houten developed a specialized press to separate the fatty part (called cocoa butter) from the purer chocolate part of a cacao seed. Before this, chocolate was very bitter and was frothed by hand to separate the fatty cocoa butter from the pure chocolate. Van Houten's press produced hard cakes of dry and bitter chocolate that could be pulverized and turned into cocoa powder. Pressed cocoa butter could be easily combined with sugar and cocoa powder and then mixed into molds to make chocolate bars.
Image credit: Public Domain
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Sweetening the Deal
Swiss chocolatier and entrepreneur Daniel Peter pioneered the use of adding evaporated milk to the mixture of cocoa butter, sugar, and crushed cacao seeds. Peter relied on Henri Nestle's help to perfect the milk chocolate recipe. Milk chocolate is less bitter than dark chocolate and is the most popular chocolate on grocery store shelves today.
Image credit: Public Domain
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Smooth Operator
In 1879, another Swiss chocolatier, Rodolphe Lindt, developed a technique known as conching. Rodolphe's conching machine enabled a process by which cocoa butter was re-mixed with chocolate at a measured rate. The mixing action of the machine produced a very smooth texture on the chocolate product and improved taste.
Image Credit: Public Domain
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Chocolate City
American businessman and chocolate maker Milton Hershey is credited with bringing chocolate to the masses. Hershey started producing his eponymous chocolate bar in 1900 from his factory 30 miles northwest of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This factory grew into a gigantic chocolate plant and soon became incorporated into a town named after Milton Hershey. The factory's prodigious output of chocolate, combined with the advent of home refrigeration and the Hershey Company's making of wartime chocolate rations for troops in World War 2, worked in tandem to create the dominance of chocolate in the world dessert market today.
Image Credit: Public Domain
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Challenges in the Chocolate Trade
Today, the majority of the world's cacao is produced on plantations in West Africa. Child labor has been extensively documented on cacao plantations that supply the world's largest manufacturers of chocolate. According to a 2022 report from the non-profit organization Food Empowerment Project, most cacao farmers make less than $1 a day, adding, "Approximately 2.1 million children in the Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most of whom are likely exposed to the worst forms of child labor."
Chocolate's Story Continues
The history of chocolate as a global commodity is inseparable from its legacy of exploitation and unjust labor practices. However, in light of these associations, many new chocolate companies and trade groups have created standards of equitable production and manufacturing of chocolate, from bean-to-bar. The state of chocolate is always advancing, with creators exploring ways to make chocolate in a way that is more sustainable and equitable. These are qualities that enhance chocolate's ability to bring people together and create a sense of community and neighborliness. These creators, like those highlighted in our Chocolate: From Beans to Bliss series, are committed to harnessing the joy of a tasty treat for the purpose of making the world a sweeter place to live.
