Though many attempts have been made to cultivate the cacao plant in other parts of the world, the finest cacao beans only thrive in areas where the cacao tree originated, in a narrow band of tropical climates around the Equator, in countries such as Venezuela, Trinidad, Papua New Guinea, and Ghana.
Though there is much controversy on the subject, most modern scientists would agree that the cacao plant is a native of South America. One variety, now called the criollo variety, comes from Venezuela, while other varieties probably originated in the Amazon River Basin.
Many Americans associate chocolate with the Aztecs of Mexico, rather than Venezuela, though the Aztecs did not discover or cultivate cacao, as the cacao tree does not grow anywhere near the high central valleys of Mexico. It is unclear when cacao began to make its way into Mexico and Central America, where in the 1500's the Europeans would discover it among the Aztecs and other local cultures. Evidence suggests that by the end of the first millennium B.C., a Venezuelan variety of cacao had made its way to southern Mexico and other parts of Central America. When the Aztecs conquered parts of southern Mexico in the late fourteenth century, they adopted and extended the uses of cacao. It is believed that in Mexico and Central America, the seeds of the cacao plant, rather than the pulp, first began to be used to make what we might now recognize as chocolate.
When the Spaniards began making contact with native peoples in the Mexican Carribbean and Gulf coasts in the 1520's, cacao was already one of the most valuable items traded on the mainland, and routinely carried hundreds of miles to satisfy the demand in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec Capital.
The Spanish began experimenting with cacao not long after their arrival in the New World, and absorbed much knowledge from the native peoples of the Americas. By the early 1600s, Spain had adopted the custom of drinking chocolate At that time drinking chocolate was thought of as an exotic luxury from the new world that required complex preparations, and was associated with high social standing.. Within fifty years, the Old World demand for the new taste sensation of hot chocolate was rapidly expanding, and the custom had spread to most parts of Europe. The custom had also taken hold in the Spanish colonial cities in the Americas. During this period, chocolate was consumed mostly as a drink that was loosely inspired by what the Aztecs had prepared. It was the Spanish, however, that first added sugar to chocolate, and the Europeans who first added milk.
In the early 1700s, cacao production was declining in Mexico, and Venezuela took the lead in exporting its fine criollo cacao to both Europe and Mexico. In the 1720s, though, disaster struck and a series of cacao disease epidemics devastated many criollo cacao groves in Venezuela. Growers began to replace their sensitive criollo trees with other varieties, such as the forastero varieties from the Amazon River Basin, that were more vigorous growers, but produced an inferior chocolate. Due to the hardiness and productivity of the forastero trees, this inferior chocolate has since come to dominate the world market. Since then, many thousands of crossings and backcrossings of the criollo and other cacao varieties have occurred, in addition to additional disease epidemics. The result of these events over the last two centuries if that very few stands of original criollo trees exist in the world today, and the fine cacao they produce is increasingly rare. Most of the chocolate produced in the world today, especially the mass-produced chocolate, is made from inferior cacao beans.
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