The history and production of chocolate
Early history in Central America
The climate of tropical rain forests combines great quantities of rainfall with high year-round temperatures and humidity. This results in the perfect conditions for the cultivation of the cacao tree plant from whose bean chocolate is derived. This tree has grown in the wild in Central America for about 10,000 years. The Olmec Indians, whose civilisation flourished in what is now southern Mexico from 1500 to 300 BC, are believed to have been the first to grow cocoa beans as a domestic crop.
The cacao tree was worshipped from about 600 AD by the Mayan people of Central America and southern Mexico, who believed it to be of divine origin. Cacao, which the early explorers referred to as cocoa, is actually a Mayan word meaning ‘god food’. The Mayans brewed a spicy, bittersweet drink by pounding the cocoa beans with maize and chilli peppers and letting the mixture ferment. This drink was reserved for use in traditional ceremonies as well as for drinking by the wealthy and by priests, who also ate a porridge made from the beans.
In about 1200 AD the Aztecs of central Mexico were introduced to cocoa beans and came to highly prize them, but because they lived further north at more arid, higher altitudes not suitable for the cultivation of the cacao tree, they had to acquire the beans through trade or by force. The Aztecs used cocoa beans as currency and taxes were paid in the beans to their rulers. In fact, the Aztec royal treasury consisted not of precious metals but of cocoa beans. The Aztecs also enjoyed a beverage made from the beans, and this again featured prominently in rituals and as a luxury available only to the very wealthy. The Aztecs called this drink ‘xocolati’. The Spanish explorers found this word almost impossible to pronounce and so corrupted it to ‘chocolat’, which the English subsequently changed to chocolate.
Introduction to Europe and North America
Chocolate was brought back to Spain in the early 16th century by Spanish explorers, who at first found the Aztec drink distasteful because of its bitterness. However, they learned to improve its taste by mixing the ground roasted beans with sugar and vanilla. Chocolate factories were established in Spain and by the early 17th century, chocolate powder was being exported to other parts of Europe. The Spanish kept the source of the drink – the beans – a secret for many years, so successfully, in fact, that when English pirates boarded a Spanish ship they thought carried great treasure and only found a load of cocoa beans, they burned the ship in frustration. If only they had known that chocolate at that time was extremely valuable.
Within a few years, the cocoa beverage produced in Spain was sought after throughout Europe. The first chocolate house in England opened in 1657, followed rapidly by many others. These establishments were used as clubs where wealthy people could meet to talk to their friends and to discuss business over a cup of chocolate. The first recorded instance of chocolate being eaten in solid form occurred when a baker in England began adding cocoa powder to cakes in the mid-1600s. Then in 1828, a Dutch chemist, Johannes Van Houten, invented a method of extracting the bitter-tasting cocoa butter from the roasted beans. His aim was to make the cocoa drink smoother and more palatable; however, unknowingly he paved the way for the chocolate bar that we consume today.
In the early 18th century, certain companies owned by prominent English families including the Frys, Rowntrees and Cadburys began making chocolate. Many of these chocolate factory owners were noted for their enlightened treatment of employees, providing not just jobs but facilities such as housing and schools. In fact, the Cadbury company constructed a large purpose-built town near Birmingham. And interestingly, Milton Hershey, founder of perhaps the most famous US chocolate-making company of its day, also established a town in Pennsylvania in 1900.
The production of chocolate
Producing chocolate is a time-consuming and complicated process. After being harvested and separated from the pods which contain them, the beans are allowed to ferment and then dried either in the sun (which produces the best chocolate) or artificially, using specially designed machines (which creates an inferior chocolate). After that the beans are roasted according to various formulas which affect the flavour of the final product.
The beans are then lightly crushed, the outer layer of shell discarded, and the internal kernels or ‘nibs’ retained. At this point, the nibs, which contain high quantities of a fat known as cocoa butter, may be treated to develop their flavour and colour. The nibs are finely ground, and in the grinding process heat is produced which liquefies the product into a substance called the ‘liquor’. This is cooled and allowed to solidify. After this stage, the chocolate is made into any of a multitude of solid forms or is ground into cocoa powder, depending on the ultimate intended use.
Classical music over the centuries
A The production of any great art form, and classical music is no exception, does not usually occur in a society dominated by the basic material demands of food and shelter. Art and music have flourished in those periods of history, and those parts of society, in which the luxury of free time and material wealth has allowed such a culture to take precedence over more material matters. In the medieval European world, it was thus primarily in the closed communities of the church and monastery, and royal courts, that music, literature and learning were able to flourish.
B It was not until the 18th century that this situation changed to any great extent, and the rise of an economically independent middle class meant that concert-going became a public activity for anyone who cared to buy a ticket. It is worth remembering that the idea of classical music widely accepted today did not exist until about 300 years ago. Performing music in concert halls to a paying audience, as something inherently pleasurable and significant, was pretty much unheard of until the 18th century, and not widely established until the 19th. The concert venue, the audience, and the idea of ‘masterpieces’ of classical music were all effectively invented during the course of the 18th century – in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and other European cities where the arts in general were blossoming.
C Today, music that was originally written for a concert venue may appear, out of its original context, in an advert or film. Conversely, music written specifically for films is sometimes performed live. But nothing has changed music over the last century more radically than the invention and dissemination of recording technologies. Although Thomas Edison originally developed the phonograph in 1877, and wax cylinders were used as early as the 1880s for recording music, commercial recordings of music were not generally available to the majority until the 1920s. From the mid-1980s onwards, the vinyl disc gradually gave way to the new technology of the CD, but just a decade later, the digital MP3 file was already displacing the CD as the favoured way to produce recorded music. Yet now, people have more music stored on their phones or computers – which they can call up with the touch of a finger – than would have been contained on all the metres of library shelves of a proud ‘record collector’ of the 20th century.
D Before recording, music was a social event – it involved one or more people coming together to make music. The music lasted for as long as the musicians sang or played and then it was over. Therefore, the only music that was heard tended to be compositions by recent or living musicians, probably working in the locality; it was rare to hear music from a past generation, distant place or culture. Even when music became professionalised, people who wanted to listen to music went to a specific venue, at a specific time, to hear musicians create a one-off event.
E These days, however, technology makes almost all the world's music instantly and constantly available to anyone with access to simple and cheap gadgets designed for playing it. Music thus floats free of any specific occasion or venue. It is no longer restricted to a particular audience or group of musicians. For the first time, music – any music – can be an entirely personal affair. This is one of the reasons that the ‘classical’ label becomes harder to pin down. One of its distinctive aspects – a performance defined by concert halls and opera houses – is dissolved by digital recording formats. As a consequence, all music, classical music included, can become any person's soundtrack for activities such as commuting, exercising or shopping.
F The ubiquity of music as recorded sound means that it is very easy to overlook perhaps the most definitive aspect of the classical music tradition: the fact that it is a written or notated music. Though classical music may lack a precise definition today and mean quite different things to different people, at its heart is the idea of a music that has remained viable over the years because it was written down in some form. The origins of what music historians think of as classical music date from the ninth century, when a system of musical notation was first developed. Before this time, singers in religious services in cathedrals or monasteries had to learn by heart a huge repertory of chants. The first attempts to notate music were intended to help them remember these. Over the next thousand years, notation became more complex, incorporating such aspects as rhythm and pitch, allowing composers to rework and refine their musical ideas. Put very simply, the history of classical music, in all its varied forms, is the history of a tradition that grew out of the possibilities of musical notation.
The role of accidents in business
In 1894 Dr John Kellogg and his brother, Will, were supervising a hospital and health spa in Michigan. The patients were on a restricted diet. One day, the brothers left cooked wheat untended for more than 24 hours. When they returned, they saw what they had done. It was no good to eat, but they decided to run the stale wheat through rollers, just to see how it would turn out. Normally, the process produced long sheets, but they were surprised to discover that this time the rollers created flat flakes. They baked them, and then tried the same thing with corn. From this accidental discovery came the cornflakes that generations have now been eating for breakfast.
Accidents happen; there is nothing predictable and orderly about innovation. Nobel laureate Sir Alan Hodgkin, who discovered how nerve cells transmit electrical impulses between the skin and the brain, commented: ‘I believe that the record of my published papers conveys an impression of directedness and planning which does not at all coincide with the actual sequence of events.’
The same rule applies in business. The mistake that gave us cornflakes keeps repeating itself in the history of disruptive innovation, the kind that transforms markets. Louis Daguerre, for instance, discovered the technique that gave us photography in the 1830s, when drops of mercury from a shattered thermometer produced a photographic image. The microwave was discovered when Percy Spencer, a scientist with Raytheon, was testing a new vacuum tube and discovered that the sweet in his pocket had melted. The artificial sweetener, saccharin, was the unintentional result of a medical scientist's work on a chemical treatment for gastric ulcers. While working for the firm 3M, researcher Art Fry had no idea he was taking the first steps towards Post-it Notes when he used bits of adhesive office paper that could be easily lifted off the page to replace the scrap paper bookmarks that kept falling out of his hymn book.
Breakthrough and disruptive innovation are rarely driven by orderly process. Usually they come out of a chaotic, haphazard mess, which is why big companies, full of managers schooled in business programmes designed to eliminate random variation and mistakes, struggle with them. In these sorts of environments, accidents are called failures and are discouraged.
It is no surprise then that research from the late British economist Paul Geroski and London Business School's Constantinos Markides found that companies that were skilled at innovation were usually not that skilled when it came to commercialisation, and vice versa. Their book, Fast Second, divides businesses into ‘colonists’ and ‘consolidators’. Small and nimble, colonists are adept at creating market niches but are terrible institution builders. Consolidators, with their strong cultures of discipline and cost control, know how to take clever ideas from other firms and turn them into mass-market items. Microsoft is a prime instance of this.
With companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on research and development, US academics Robert Austin and Lee Devin examined how managers can encourage productive slip-ups. In their article Accident, Intention and Expectation in the Innovation Process, they argue that business processes actually prevent helpful mis-steps from occurring. According to their catalogue of accidents, not all false steps and mishaps are equal. Accidents, they say, come from unlikely mental associations such as memories and vague connections, looking for something and finding it in an unexpected way, looking for one thing and finding something else, and not looking for anything but finding something valuable.
Accident-prone innovation, they say, requires companies to get outside the ‘cone of expectation’. It means throwing together groups from diverse backgrounds and combining ideas in unpredictable ways. Other strategies also include having systems that watch out for accidents and examine them for value, generating them when they do not happen often enough, seizing on the useful ones, capturing their valuable features, and building on them to add value and give potential for useful accidents.
All this, however, requires thinking that is often counter-intuitive to the way businesses operate. In other words, it is the kind of thinking that goes against the beliefs of most business managers. It runs counter to the notion frequently pushed by consultants that you can ‘harness’ creativity and direct it to line up with intention. ‘The cost of accidents that do not prove valuable are often of concern to people in business,’ they write. ‘In business, people tend to call such efforts failure.’
There are tentative signs that more companies are starting to realise that failure can lead to commercial gain, and that this is part of the risk-taking that underpins innovation. Australia's largest brewing company, for example, made a bad error when it launched a new beer called Empire Lager, pitched at younger consumers. Having spent a fortune creating a beer with a sweeter taste, designing a great-looking bottle and a television campaign, Foster's was left with a drink that no-one wanted to buy. The target market was more interested in brands built up by word of mouth.
Instead of wiping the unsuccessful product launch, Foster's used this lesson learned to go on and develop other brands instead. One of them, Pure Blonde, is now ranked as Australia's fifth-largest beer brand. Unlike Empire Lager, there has been almost no promotion and its sales are generated more by word of mouth.
Other companies are taking similar steps to study their own slip-ups. Intuit, the company behind financial tools such as Quicken, holds regular ‘When Learning Hurts’ sessions. But this sort of transformation is never easy. In a market that focuses on the short-term, convincing employees and shareholders to tolerate failure and not play it safe is a big thing to ask.