By the 1840s, the notion of Valentine\u2019s Day as a holiday to celebrate romantic love had taken over most of the English-speaking world. It was\u00a0Cupid\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0golden age: The prudish\u00a0Victorians<\/a>\u00a0adored the notion of courtly love and showered each other with\u00a0elaborate cards<\/a>\u00a0and gifts. Into this love-crazed fray came Richard Cadbury, scion of a British chocolate manufacturing family and responsible for sales at a crucial point in his company\u2019s history. Cadbury had recently improved its chocolate-making technique so as to extract pure cocoa butter from whole beans, producing more palatable drinking chocolate than most Britons had ever tasted. This process resulted in an excess amount of cocoa butter, which Cadbury used to produce many more varieties of what was then called \u201ceating chocolate.\u201d Richard recognized a great marketing opportunity for the new chocolates and started selling them in beautifully decorated boxes that he himself designed.<\/p>\n From that point, it was a quick jump to taking the familiar images of Cupids and roses and putting them on heart-shaped boxes. While Richard Cadbury didn\u2019t actually patent the heart-shaped box, it\u2019s widely believed that he was the first to produce one. Cadbury marketed the boxes as having a dual purpose: When the chocolates had all been eaten, the box itself was so pretty that it could be used again and again to store mementos, from locks of hair to love letters. The boxes grew increasingly elaborate until the outbreak of\u00a0World War II<\/a>, when\u00a0sugar was rationed<\/a>\u00a0and Valentine\u2019s Day celebrations were scaled down. But Victorian-era Cadbury boxes still exist, and many are treasured family heirlooms or valuable items prized by collectors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who Created the First Valentine’s Day Box of Chocolates? By the 1840s, the notion of Valentine\u2019s Day as a holiday to celebrate romantic love had taken over most of the English-speaking world. It was\u00a0Cupid\u2019s\u00a0golden age: The prudish\u00a0Victorians\u00a0adored the notion of courtly love and showered each other with\u00a0elaborate cards\u00a0and gifts. Into this love-crazed fray came Richard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1151,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1150","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2022\/12\/Valentine.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1153,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions\/1153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}