Philippe Suchard invented the effective device for quick making of a homogeneous medley from sugar and cocoa powder.

This Suchard's device consisted of a flat heating granite flag and several granite rollers that moving backwards and forwards over it. Indeed, this old principle in modern interpretation is used in chocolate’s manufacture till now.

Suchard built his factory in what is now the Neuchâtel suburb of Serrières, where a river emerging from a spring has cut a deep gorge. The regular flow of the water had long been used for mills of various kinds. Suchard used it to drive his machinery. When he started his manufacturing, he employed only two people, and they produced 25-30 kg of chocolate a day.

There was no any instant success. At that time it was very complex business. A chocolate was rather expensive and exotic product. So Suchard’s orders were really slow at first. Everything was solved by one strange quirk of history.

That time Neuchâtel was not only a Swiss canton, it simultaneously also belonged to the far-away King of Prussia. And in 1842 Suchard received an order for his chocolate from the royal court in Berlin. The factory eventually took off, and was soon marketing its output abroad as well as in Switzerland.

Suchard chocolate won gold medals at the London's Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855.

In 1880 Suchard was the first Swiss chocolate maker to set up a factory abroad, in Lörrach in Germany, just over the border from Basle. By the early 1880s the Suchard company was producing about half the total national output of chocolate and employing about half the total number of people working in the industry.



Milka history