For many of us, chocolate milk is pure childhood. It came in little cartons at school, or from a glass at the kitchen table with a squirt of syrup stirred in. It seems like the kind of simple pleasure that must have always existed. But somebody, somewhere, had to put milk and chocolate together first.
Here's the short answer: the person most often credited with inventing chocolate milk is Sir Hans Sloane, an Anglo-Irish doctor who lived in Jamaica in the late 1680s. London's Natural History Museum lists him as the inventor of drinking chocolate with milk. But one historian points out that people in Jamaica were likely already making a cacao drink boiled with milk and cinnamon, and Sloane probably learned the idea there.
Chocolate Before Milk
Chocolate drinks are ancient. Cacao was first domesticated at least 5,300 years ago in what is now Ecuador, and the Maya were drinking cacao beverages by 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. Their version was served cold and made with water, vanilla, cornmeal, and chili peppers. They poured it back and forth between a cup and a pot until it turned thick and foamy.
Milk wasn't part of the original recipe because there were no dairy cattle in the Americas. Christopher Columbus brought the first domesticated cattle to the Caribbean in 1493, and cacao reached Europe in the 1520s. Once both ingredients were in the same place, people likely started mixing them.
The Doctor in Jamaica
Hans Sloane was a respected physician who traveled to the Caribbean in 1687. In Jamaica, he tried the local cacao drink made with water and reportedly found it nauseating. Adding milk made it more palatable to him.
Historian James Delbourgo has noted that Jamaicans were brewing a hot drink from freshly harvested cacao shavings, boiled with milk and cinnamon, as far back as 1494. Many recipes mixing chocolate with spice, eggs, sugar, and milk were also already circulating by the 1600s. So Sloane may have created his own version, but he probably wasn't the first. Some sources even credit a man named Daniel Peter, who used condensed milk in 1875, though milk was being added to chocolate centuries before that.
From Medicine to Brand Name
For a long time, hot chocolate was treated partly as medicine and used for ailments like liver and stomach troubles. By the 1750s, a London grocer named Nicholas Sanders was selling what he claimed was Sloane's recipe as a medicinal elixir. "Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate" may have been the first brand-name milk chocolate drink. In the 1800s, the Cadbury Brothers sold tins of drinking chocolate that also invoked Sloane's recipe.
A Man Who Left Much More Behind
Sloane is remembered for far more than a drink. He gathered a collection of 71,000 items and left it to the British nation, helping to found the British Museum, the British Library, and London's Natural History Museum. Sloane Square in London is named after him.
Today, chocolate milk is still a lunchroom favorite. In New York City alone, school officials have reported serving about 100 million cartons of milk a year, and nearly 60 percent of them were fat-free chocolate milk. So whether you credit a famous doctor or the people of Jamaica, raise a glass to a very old and very good idea.
