Long live Cacao! Hail to the Wilbur Chocolate Museum!

by Dea Adria Mallin

Chocolate bliss, chocolate guilt, chocoholic. Four-tiered fountains of flowing melted chocolate anticipating the dip of luscious fruits. Chocolate with lavender, chocolate with chili, chocolate with coconut, chocolate with jasmine. Milk chocolate. Dark chocolate. Chocolate soup and chocolate truffles. Your first chocolate kiss.

Since the sensory memory of your first chocolate is lasting, if you are American, you probably want light milk chocolate, while the French thrill to extra bitter dark chocolate, and the Swiss, the Belgians, and the Japanese love buttery, high fat, slick and satiny chocolate.     

Of course, if you are American, the source of chocolate life is Pennsylvania, where Milton Hershey -- who made his first million on caramels and then, at an 1893 exposition in Chicago, bought a German machine to coat the caramels with chocolate -- was called “the Henry Ford of Chocolate Makers.” Today, tourists flock to Hershey, Pennsylvania, “The Chocolate Town,” to be whisked on automated carts through “Chocolate World.”

And then there is little Lititz, a serene town eight miles north of Lancaster PA and home, as I see it, to the chocolate Wilbur Bud. When I was in elementary school, everyone had a few pennies to buy penny candy after school, and the most available chocolates were Hershey’s. But if you were really lucky, you got to buy Wilbur Buds. They came in dark or milk chocolate, and each bud had more substance, more chocolate flavor instead of sugar sweetness, lasted a lot longer in your mouth, and satisfied the craving for chocolate ecstasy.  

Today, the Wilbur Chocolate Company is part of Cargill Incorporated, one of the largest private companies in the United States, but its recipe for Wilbur Buds has not changed since 1893, nor has the mold for the unique design, by founder Henry Oscar Wilbur, for the sturdy little solid chocolate that looks like a budding flower. In anecdotal history, first there was the chocolate Wilbur Bud, and then, afterwards, there was the Hershey Kiss, but Hershey wrapped its kiss in silver foil before Wilbur wrapped its bud.

Historically, the company began with H. O. Wilbur in Philadelphia and the Kendig Chocolate Company in Lititz, PA. Mr. Wilbur’s confectionary company first produced molasses and hard candies which were sold to the railroads for train boys to sell to passengers. All that was needed was a copper kettle, a coal fire, some buckets, and a marble slab.

Soon enough, Wilbur was also manufacturing cocoa and chocolate and doing so well that he retired at 59. His son brought in experienced chocolate makers from France, and the third generation of the Wilbur family trained in Germany and developed the machine that foil-wrapped the famous Wilbur Buds.

Success brought changes, with the factory relocated partially and then entirely to Lititz by 1933, a merger with the Swiss chocolate company, Suchard, until 1958, and then other mergers and sales until, in 1992, the Wilbur Chocolate Company was acquired by Cargill.  Where it used to sell directly to the public in retail stores, the company is now an industrial ingredient supplier (like the European Valrhona) to the rest of the industry, producing 170 million pounds of chocolate a year from the best chocolate beans available. There is a mail-order catalogue for buds, wafers, cocoa, and many other items. And there is the Museum and Candy Americana Outlet in Lititz where you can pick up a pound of dark chocolate Wilbur buds for $5.35. 

Lititz is the nation’s oldest settlement of Amish and Mennonite farmers. They still use the horse-drawn buggy and produce more food than any other non-irrigated county in North America. The town produces both Sturgis pretzels and Wilbur chocolates, so that today, there are close to a million visitors a year who want to tour the pretzel and chocolate premises.

In an age of razzle-dazzle interactive museums, it is comforting to think along the simple lines of the three-room Wilbur Museum, created in 1972 by Penny Buzzard, the wife of the company president. She scoured antique shows and flea markets for old chocolate molds and chocolate memorabilia. Eventually, she collected more than 1,000 varieties of molds, tins, and boxes, and soon, business associates of Wilbur learned of her efforts and contributed early chocolate machinery, marble slabs, starch trays, and copper kettles. There are more than 150 hand-painted European and Oriental antique porcelain chocolate pots from France, Bavaria, England, and Switzerland, some bearing the names of Limoges, Haviland, and Dresden.

In 1977, Wilbur’s modern Candy Kitchen was opened on the first floor of the manufacturing plant, so you can hear the curious sounds of the machinery above while you breathe deeply the aroma of chocolate. It’s an old-fashioned candy store where the visitor can watch the ladies molding and dipping as they turn out almond bark, fudge, peanut butter meltaways, heavenly hash, mint drizzle, and almond butter crunch.

There is also a video host to explore the history of the cocoa bean and the journey from the rainforests of Mezoamerica to the very products we crave today.

The museum is a major tourist attraction but it still charges no admission, gives free samples, and opens from 10 am to 5 pm, Monday through Saturday. Like Hershey’s Chocolate World, they would let you into the operating areas of the chocolate plant, but OSHA, FDA, and the insurers prohibit it.

Chocolate 101: From the Rainforest to the Candy Counter 

From ancient times until the Spanish conquest of Mezoamerica, it was the Olmecs, then the Maya, followed by the Aztecs, who held the secrets – and the vast trade routes -- of chocolate. The first discoverers found it in the steamy tropical forest, encased in huge seed pods. They took an enormous imaginative leap past the sweet, gooey, pulpy, white interior to the bitter seed, dried it in the sun, roasted it on clay, ground it on stone slabs, combined it  with vanilla, chili peppers, and sometimes honey, and turned the bitter bean to…chocolate.

Fit only for the royals and the religious elite, both the drink and the ceremonial containers and storage areas for the beans were highly prized. The Aztecs also used the beans as money, and when Cortez came to the Americas seeking gold, what he found were the Aztec storerooms – “banks,” if you will, packed with the priceless cacao beans.

The Spanish conquistadores introduced chocolate to Spain where it met another import from the Americas, sugar, and the drink took off as chocolate salons grew like...well, Starbucks. The drink was unlike what the wealthy cacao barons’ wives in Spanish Colonial Mexico drank by the gourdful during mass and at lavish mid-afternoon gatherings, which was a heavily spiced mixture of cacao, thickened with ground and toasted corn, vanilla, and chili peppers.

In the salons of Europe, there were special pots and cups for the aphrodisiac chocolate drinks. These were made from silver, tinned copper, white iron, porcelain and earthenware. The Vatican served its cardinals and popes hot chocolate, Voltaire had to have his morning chocolate, Marie-Antoinette drank hot chocolate from a chocolatière at breakfast, and chocolate-houses, like coffeehouses, flourished across London and Europe. 

For 90% of its history, then, chocolate was a liquid drink of the elite, though the 21^st century world, and every kid alive, knows it better today as a solid the likes of Hershey Kisses, Snickers bars, gold boxes of Godiva, or Lindt truffles. Hershey’s ads once called a bar of chocolate “a meal in itself.”

And that brings us to the chocolate makers and their inventions. When the Spaniards introduced chocolate to Spain, France, England and most of Europe, inventions and innovations followed, including using the steam engine to grind the cacao, and Van Houten’s 1828 cocoa press to extract cocoa butter from chocolate and leave behind the powder. Rodolphe Lindt’s machine turned the paste into a smooth blend, and Henri Nestlé’s mix of chocolate liquor with condensed milk made the first “milk” chocolate. That reduced the amount of cacao needed – and reduced the price! Chocolate would now comes to the masses.

By 1847, there was the first chocolate bar. In America, the Wilbur Bud came along in 1893, and in 1907, the silver-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss came out. American soldiers during WWI got chocolate bars in their C-rations, and by 1930, there were 40,000 different chocolate bars. We all know the rest of the story.

But let’s remember that it is the cacao tree that is the source of every chocolate bar and truffle ever made. And that every huge cacao pod grows out of a diminutive white cacao blossom. And that without the midge that beats its wings a record 1,000 times a minute and lives in the lush mush of the rainforest floor to pollinate the flower, every day, all year round, there would be no chocolate.

And remember that El Niño, along with disease -- like witches’ broom and cocoa wilt and black pod -- strikes terror in the industry as the Achilles’ heel of cacao, which will only grow 20 degrees north or south of the Equator and requires shade trees above, and needs 60 inches of rain a year.

Remember, too, that late 20^th century technology thought it had controlled cacao diseases, only to find that the disease-resistant plants produced acidic and inedible chocolate! Then ask who is willing, anymore, to perform the labor-intensive tasks of separating the seed, of roasting and grinding, and of conching and tempering, especially when it takes twelve cacao seeds to make just a single ounce of dark chocolate.

Although there are still producers in the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Venezuela, Brazil, Java, and Malaysia, today it is West Africa that ranks first in providing the cacao for world consumption.

The 80-year-old Silvio Crespo, longtime technical director at Wilbur Chocolate recently told culinary historian Maricel Presillo, who is herself a descendent of cacao farmers as well as author of The New Taste of Chocolate; A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao, that from the Wilbur parking lot, he could tell which beans were roasting, so distinctive was each aroma.

Today, he added, that is no longer possible. “In the good old days,” we were able pinpoint cacao beans by areas, variety or countries such as Maracaibo, Caracas, Arriba. Today, we simply call them Venezuelan, or Ecuadorian, or African. Before long, most of the cacao beans will be grown from hybrids and clones and whatever future technology holds in order to reach large yield productions and to develop disease-resistance. Who knows what will happen to the flavor of cacao beans then?”

One hopes that a museum dedicated to the history and production of chocolate will never be a monument to the past. So if for no other reason than to protect your future supply of the food of the gods, including Wilbur Buds, protect the rainforest!