International Chocolate Day hands the calendar to chocolate itself, in whatever form you like it best. Break off a square of something dark, stir a mug of cocoa, and give it a minute of your attention.
No founder, founding organisation or establishing act for International Chocolate Day appears in any source opened for this page. What is documented is a listing: the National Confectioners Association, the United States confectionery trade body, carried September 13 on its own calendar of candy days and named the day in its newsroom without giving a reason for the date.
International Chocolate Day is a day for a crop that grows in a narrow band of the world. Chocolate starts on a small tropical tree, and the International Cocoa Organization's February 2025 bulletin puts 71.5% of the forecast world crop in Africa.
Cocoa beans are the tree's seeds, dried and fermented, and packed in a fruit called a cocoa pod. A bar is what people worked out to do with them.
The day shares its date with a Pennsylvania farm boy. Milton Snavely Hershey was born on September 13, 1857, in Derry Township, and he later built his chocolate factory back in that same township. The confectionery trade association that lists the day on its own calendar of candy days does not explain the date there, or in the newsroom post where it named the day.
DEALS & OFFERS
International Chocolate Day ran on September 13. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
The oldest known trace of anyone using cacao is not in Mesoamerica, where the plant was long thought to have been domesticated. Researchers writing in Nature Ecology and Evolution found cacao starch grains, theobromine residues and ancient DNA at Santa Ana-La Florida in southeast Ecuador, dating from approximately 5,300 years ago. To their knowledge, they wrote, it is the earliest evidence in the Americas.
For a very long time afterwards, chocolate was a drink. Linnaeus named the tree in 1753, and the Aztecs used its beans as currency before Spaniards carried it to Europe.
Solid chocolate has a patent date. Cornell University Library's cacao exhibition puts the modern era of chocolate making at 1828, when Coenraad Van Houten patented a way of pressing most of the cocoa butter out of processed cacao.
Untreated cocoa mass runs about 53% cocoa butter, against about 27% after his press. Stirred back in, that butter gave makers a substance supple enough to be molded into bars.
Milton Hershey came to chocolate late, and by machine. He bought German chocolate-making equipment at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, spent years on milk condensing at his birthplace farm, and introduced Hershey's Milk Chocolate in late 1900.
His birthday became a public event only once. In April 1937 factory workers held a sit-down strike, the first job action by the newly formed CIO union, and the Hershey Community Archives says it divided the town and devastated him.
Five months later, on the evening of September 13, more than 6,000 employees and their families filled the Hershey Arena. A cake three feet high, lit with 80 electric candles, stood in the middle. The archive says it was arranged to let him know he was still greatly honored by his employees, and that 1939 was the last year the town marked the date.
The observance is younger and thinner. Its name turns up in only eight volumes of HathiTrust's full-text index, five of them Creative Forecasting, a monthly of activity ideas for retirement communities, starting with its 2000 volume.
The same library holds that magazine's 1993, 1994 and 1995 volumes, all searchable, and the name is in none of them. The trade association named the day in its newsroom in September 2015, still without naming an author.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Cocoa futures hit an all-time record in December 2024.
Cocoa is not a steady thing to build a treat on. New York cocoa futures traded as high as $11,938 a metric ton on 17 December 2024, an all-time record, after rising more than 180% since the start of the year.
The international rule is Codex Alimentarius standard CXS 87-1981, under which the type named simply chocolate must hold not less than 35 percent total cocoa solids on a dry matter basis. The same standard caps vegetable fats other than cocoa butter at 5 percent of the finished product.
CHOCOSUISSE reports that Swiss chocolate consumption fell to 10.6 kg a head in 2024, which the trade body puts down to record cocoa prices reaching the shelf. Imports hold 40% of the Swiss market there, against 19% in 2000.
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GOOD TO KNOW
Codex requires white chocolate to hold not less than 20 percent cocoa butter and not less than 14 percent milk solids, and sets no minimum at all for fat-free cocoa solids, the cocoa mass that makes milk and dark chocolate brown.
21 CFR 163.130 asks milk chocolate for not less than 10 percent by weight of chocolate liquor, plus 3.39 percent milkfat and 12 percent total milk solids.
Cornell University Library's cacao exhibition notes that chocolate begins as a tiny blossom, and that only three out of a thousand of them will produce the pods that carry the beans.
Codex defines chocolate a la taza, a drinking chocolate that may carry a maximum of 8 percent flour or starch from wheat, maize or rice, and a family version that may carry up to 18 percent.
The confectionery trade association's own explainer notes that Congress discontinued its special observance process in January 1995, and that fewer than 150 presidential commemorative proclamations are granted in an average year.
Usually a company or individual connected to the candy type contacts a major calendar of events publisher - like Chase's Calendar of Events. The day is often chosen for a significant reason.
GOOD TO KNOW
keeps its own National Chocolate Day on 14 February, instituted in 2005 to push domestic consumption of Ghanaian chocolate, and widened by the Ghana Tourism Authority into a National Chocolate Week in 2021
is the single largest source of the beans, forecast at 1,850 thousand tonnes for 2024/25
leads the Americas at a forecast 480 thousand tonnes, and holds the site where the oldest known cacao residues were found
is the largest producer in Asia, forecast at 200 thousand tonnes of the region's 300
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found, and the Federal Register carries no document naming it, so it is a normal working day.
COLOPHON
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