National Chocolate Mint Day takes the side of everyone who reaches past the plain bar for the one with mint in it. Unwrap a patty, snap a square of the dark kind, or let the green ice cream soften in a bowl.
No founder, sponsor or establishing record for the day has been located in the indexes searched here. A holiday-listing page for February 19 was already being archived in 2006, and by 2015 the National Confectioners Association carried Chocolate Mint Day on its own candy calendar, a list the association says it maintains without having a connection to most of the days on it.
The chill in a chocolate mint is not a temperature. The mouth reports one anyway, and National Chocolate Mint Day is built on that report.
Menthol acts on a receptor called TRPM8, which sits in sensory nerve endings. The same receptor opens on its own when the temperature around those endings drops below roughly 26 degrees Celsius. Menthol opens it with no drop in temperature.
Both routes open the same channel in the same nerve endings. The team that cloned it described menthol as one of the agents that elicit a cooling sensation, and the wording is exact.
Menthol delivers the sensation. It does not deliver the cooling.
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National Chocolate Mint Day ran on February 19. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Peppermint is not a plant that turned up on its own. Kew's Plants of the World Online accepts Mentha × piperita as a hybrid and prints the formula: watermint crossed with spearmint. The name goes back to Linnaeus, published in Species Plantarum in 1753.
The hybrid is also sterile. Its reproduction happens only through vegetative propagation by rhizomes and stolons, so a peppermint plant is grown from a piece of another one rather than from seed.
The pairing got into print far later than the plant did. The phrase chocolate peppermints appears nowhere in California's digitised newspaper archive before 18 March 1893, when it turns up in the San Francisco Call. Ninety-two items carry it in that archive through 1922, and none is earlier.
By the end of the decade it had a wrapper. A Santa Barbara paper of 8 February 1899 quotes the price of a package of Lowney's Chocolate Peppermints, which put the flavour on a shelf under a brand name.
The branded products came decades after that. Hershey's own brand page records the York Peppermint Pattie as created in 1940 at the York Cone Company in York, Pennsylvania. The brand did not join Hershey until 1988.
A second one came out of a fundraising programme. Girl Scout Cookies came in three varieties in 1951: Sandwich, Shortbread and Chocolate Mints, which the organisation now calls Thin Mints. By 1982 the Thin Mint was one of three varieties the bakers were required to produce.
The day itself is the newest thing here and the least documented: no founder, sponsor or establishing record for it turned up in the indexes searched. What does exist is a listing, and it belongs to the candy trade.
The National Confectioners Association's own candy calendar gives February 19 to Chocolate Mint Day, without the word National. Captures of that page carry the entry back to 2015. The same page sets out how days like it get made: no accreditation process, no government agency, and a company or individual connected to the sweet in question who writes to a calendar publisher.
TIMELINE
While the National Confectioners Association does maintain a list of many of these special observance days, the association does not have a connection to most of them. In many cases, the origin (and the sponsor) is unknown.
GOOD TO KNOW
Sensory neurons and nerve fibres from mice lacking TRPM8 show profoundly diminished responses to cold, and the animals show clear deficits in telling a cold surface from a warm one. They still avoid surfaces below 10 degrees Celsius, though with reduced efficiency, so the menthol channel does not carry the whole cold sense.
A 2025 review of mouthfeel reports that menthol may feel cool at low concentrations but cause burning at higher doses. The line between refreshing and painful is a question of dose.
Julius's laboratory called it CMR1, for cold and menthol sensitive receptor. Patapoutian's laboratory called it TRPM8, and by 2007 Julius's own group was publishing under that name too.
The confectioners' candy calendar marks a chocolate day in July, another in October and a third in December. Its own parentheses number them the first, second and third of the year.
Peppermint's lineage does not stop at two parents. A Washington State University laboratory that works on the plant counts three species in it, because spearmint is a cross of Mentha longifolia and Mentha suaveolens.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Two laboratories found the cold receptor by following menthol.
Two laboratories used menthol to hunt down the receptor that reports cold, and both published in 2002. The Nobel Assembly's 2021 press release says David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian each did it independently, with the same compound.
Peppermint oil is steam distilled from fresh leaves and goes predominantly into toothpaste, chewing gum and candy. The oil that makes a dessert feel cold is the same industrial ingredient that makes a mouth taste clean.
Food chemists credit chocolate's smooth melt and its release of flavour to the rapid fall in solid fat near body temperature. The fat that most strongly favours cocoa butter's stable crystal form melts at about 33 to 36 degrees Celsius, a figure that shifts with the crystal form and the test conditions.
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No, it is an unofficial observance and a normal working day. The Federal Register carries no document under the name, and no legal standing for it turned up in the indexes checked.
COLOPHON
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