Menier Chocolate

The Menier Chocolate company (French: Chocolat Menier) was a chocolate manufacturing business founded in 1816 as a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Paris, France, at a time when chocolate was used as a medicinal product and was only one part of the overall business.

Controlled and run by the Menier family for more than 150 years, the heads of Menier Chocolate company were:

In 1816, Antoine Brutus Menier founded the Menier Hardware Company in Paris. Although not trained as a pharmacist, he began preparing and selling a variety of powders for medicinal purposes. The business grew rapidly but for the first few years the company's production of chocolate was very limited, as its primary usage was as a medicinal powder and for coating bitter-tasting pills.

In 1825 the company began an expansion through the acquisition of a second production facility on land on the banks of the Marne River at Noisiel, at the time a small village of less than 200 inhabitants at the outskirts of Paris. Initially used as a grinding works for the production of medicinal powders, a modernization of the Noisiel facility in 1830 made it the first mechanized mass production factory for cocoa powder in France. Following the development of solid chocolate, Menier introduced to the market a block of chocolate wrapped in decorative yellow paper. By 1842, the success of the chocolate business led to another expansion of the Noisiel plant and by 1853 annual chocolate production reached 4,000 tons.

Under the leadership of the founder's son, Emile-Justin Menier, the company concentrated solely on the manufacturing of chocolate products. In 1864 he sold off the pharmaceutical manufacturing part of the business and began a period of expansion that made the Menier Chocolate company the largest chocolate manufacturer in France. Under Emile-Justin Menier, the company purchased cocoa-growing estates in Nicaragua along with sugar beet fields and a sugar refinery at Roye in the Somme in France.

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