Chocolate comes in many forms and is mainly due to how it is processed. This will normally include the selection of cacao beans, roasting and crushing of beans, and the sort of ingredients added into the mix - milk, sugar, emulsifier, etc. The main types are milk, with variations like white and sweet or semisweet chocolates and dark, bitter or unsweetened versions.
Milk chocolate is a combination of cocoa butter, sugar, milk, emulsifier, soy lecithin and vanilla. It's cocoa content ranges from 10-20% with milk solids of about 12%. It is what many people refer to when they talk about chocolate. It's smooth irresistible melt-in-your mouth texture means it is really difficult to let go once you take a bite. At the other end of this is the dark, bitter or unsweetened version with cacao content ranging from 62% - 99%. The darker and more cacao content a chocolate has, the more beneficially healthy it is.
The first edible chocolate bar was made by the English chocolateur Joseph Storrs Fry in 1849. However the milk chocolate as we know it today had its beginnings in the late 19th century when the Swiss developed several processes that made a solid chocolate bar possible. The major players here were Daniel Peter, a Swiss chocoloteur who combined powdered milk and cocoa, Henri Nestle, a Swiss chemist who invented powdered milk in 1867 and Rudolphe Lindt who used an uncommon process known as 'conching' to significantly alter chocolate into a blendable malleable candy bar.
Chocolate was never to be the same again and has since gone through great improvements and many variations as indicated above.
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