In 1819, Francois-Louis Cailler developed the recipe that transforms cocoa beans into a chocolate bar and Rudolph Lindt, also Swiss, eventually perfected the process by adding cocoa butter. By the late 1860s, Jean Tobler formulated the Toblerone bar and in 1875 Daniel Peter combined cocoa powder with milk, creating milk chocolate. Henri Nestlé formed the Swiss Chocolate Society, which we now know as the Nestlé company.
Although there are larger countries whose population in the aggregate consume more chocolate, Switzerland is the country where on average, each Swiss citizen or resident eats more than 23 pounds of chocolate every year – the most of any country in the world on a per capita basis.
Curiously, and without implying there is any bias or favoritism, The New England Journal of Medicine once published a research study correlating chocolate consumption with the number of Nobel Prizes won by its citizens. According to the study, Switzerland comes in second, only behind Sweden, in Nobel prize winning laureates on a per capita.
How sweet is that?
Switzerland
