All food products have a history.
With cocoa, we have to go back to the time of Columbus while on one of his adventures, he came across the cocoa bean. It was not until the Aztecs prepared these beans that the cocoa beans aroused interest. For many years Spain kept this method of preparing chocolate a secret. It was only when Jews fleeing to Bayonne, France that the long-kept secret leaked outside of Spanish occupied lands. After that, interest in the cocoa bean spread to Austria, England, the Netherlands, and North America.