Cocoa Currency

Picture a bustling Aztec marketplace in the 1400s. Shoppers weave between stalls piled with avocados, chili peppers, woven textiles, and jade trinkets. But instead of clinking coins or shells, the shoppers’ purses rustle with cacao beans. A farmer counts out a dozen of these dark brown beans to buy a turkey egg. A noblewoman pays twenty beans to a porter for carrying her goods. A few children even toss beans in a game of chance, gambling their chocolate money. It might sound like a scene from Willy Wonka, but it’s drawn from real history – a time when chocolate literally served as currency. For the Aztecs, the Maya, and other Mesoamerican peoples, cacao beans were cold, hard cash. More than just the source of a treasured drink, cacao beans became the lifeblood of commerce, tribute, and even myth. This is the rich story of how chocolate went from divine delicacy to economic cornerstone – and what that legacy means for how we value chocolate today.

Money That Grew on Trees

In ancient Mesoamerica, the saying “money doesn’t grow on trees” didn’t quite apply – because in a sense, money did grow on trees. The currency of the realm sprouted from the cacao tree, whose pods encase the precious beans. Indigenous civilizations domesticated cacao over 3,000 years ago for its heavenly taste, but by the Classic Maya period (250–900 CE) something extraordinary was happening: cacao seeds were being used as money in addition to being enjoyed as food.

How did a humble bean become as good as gold? The key lies in cacao’s high value and rarity. Cacao trees only flourish in tropical climates like the southern Yucatán, Guatemala, and coastal Chiapas – far from the central Mexican highlands. To the Maya and Aztecs, who loved consuming chocolate, these beans were a luxury item imbued with almost mystical worth. In Maya mythology, cacao was considered one of the divine ingredients in human creation, and the Aztecs believed Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom, had gifted cacao to humankind. With such cultural cachet, cacao beans were already treated as special – so it wasn’t a huge leap for people to start trading them for other goods.

By around the 7th century CE, historical evidence suggests cacao beans had effectively become a form of commodity money in Maya lands. What began as barter of cacao for say, corn or cloth, evolved into a more standardized practice: beans counted out for set prices. Rulers accepted taxes in cacao beans, and marketplace vendors trusted these little tokens in exchange for their wares. Essentially, chocolate had become legal tender among the Maya long before coins existed there.

The Aztecs, rising to power later (ca. 14th–16th century), adopted this cocoa currency enthusiastically. They couldn’t grow cacao in the dry central highlands around their capital, so they obtained it through trade and tribute. To them, cacao beans were a tangible form of wealth: portable, countable, and deeply desirable. The fact that beans could also be made into a prized chocolate drink only enhanced their status. Some Spanish chroniclers wrote that the Aztecs valued cacao beans more than gold – after all, you can’t drink gold or make a spicy cocoa out of it! One poet of the time even mused that “the glory of the new king is measured in cacao”. In economic terms, cacao beans functioned as a commodity currency with intrinsic value (people genuinely wanted them for consumption) and exchange value (they were used to buy things). It was one of history’s most delicious forms of money.

It’s worth noting that power followed the cacao supply. Control over fertile cacao-growing regions could make a city rich. For example, in the 600s, several Maya city-states fought a war for dominance of the cacao-producing region of Tabasco. When the dust settled, the victorious kingdom of Calakmul gained access to the coveted groves – and with them a stream of cocoa wealth. This “money that grew on trees” fueled Calakmul’s prosperity. Similar stories played out later in Aztec conquests: lands that grew cacao were especially prized prizes. In this way, chocolate not only greased the wheels of commerce – it could literally spark conflicts and empire-building, just like control of oil or gold has in more recent times.

The Marketplace: Buying Goods with Chocolate Beans

Once cacao beans became currency, they transformed everyday economics. In the markets of Maya cities and Aztec capitals alike, cacao beans jingled in the pockets of commoners and nobles. They were the small change of the day, used to buy everything from food to services. Spanish observers who first witnessed this were amazed: an entire economy humming along on little brown seeds! One friar in the 1500s noted with astonishment that in the Aztec market, “with five cacao beans one can buy something, with thirty beans another thing, and with a hundred beans yet another – and no haggling needed.” In other words, prices were understood in cacao units, and buyers and sellers had a shared trust in this chocolate money.

What could you get for a cacao bean? Surprisingly much, as it turns out. Historical sources and Spanish accounts give us an enchanting price list of goods in cacao currency. For example, one cacao bean in an Aztec market might buy a large tomato or a tamale, or even a full avocado. Three beans could purchase a turkey egg or a bunch of fresh chili peppers. Ten beans might be a fair price for a small rabbit for dinner. For twenty beans, you could hire a porter or laborer for a day’s work – essentially the daily wage for common labor paid in chocolate. A basket of fine corn or a handmade cotton loincloth might cost 30 to 40 beans. On the higher end of the scale, 100 cacao beans could buy a turkey hen, a substantial purchase for a feast. Indeed, one colonial record from Tlaxcala around 1545 lists 100 cacao beans for a turkey as a going rate. Considering 100 beans was literally a sackful in your hand, you can imagine the gravity of such a transaction.

It’s delightful to picture: an Aztec shopper counting out beans into the vendor’s hand to pay for produce, much as we would count coins. The beans themselves varied in quality and size, and this was acknowledged in their value. Big, plump cacao beans – which made the richest chocolate – were especially esteemed. Ironically, that meant people tended to spend the best beans as currency (since everyone accepted them readily) and reserve the smaller or broken beans for making their own cup of chocolate at home. In a real sense, your money was too precious to drink!

Market transactions using cacao were so common that the language reflected it. The Aztecs had quantitative terms specific to cacao counts: a bunch of 20 beans (called a zantli) was a basic unit, and 8,000 beans (a xiquipilli) was a standard “sack” or load used for big trades. Professional merchants, known as pochteca, traveled great distances to trade cacao beans and other commodities, and they kept strict count of every bean. In the famous market of Tlatelolco (the largest in the Aztec world), cacao beans flowed through the stalls like an edible currency exchange. There, one Spanish conquistador observed, “they sold everything by count of cacao, no other money was seen.” Whether you were buying clay pots, clothing, pets, or food, everyone understood the worth of a cacao bean.

Cacao currency also found its way into more leisurely pursuits. Gambling with cacao beans was a popular pastime – essentially betting chocolate money on games. Aztec nobles played games of patolli (a bit like dice or board games) where piles of cacao beans were wagered on the outcome. A tense round of gambling might see heaps of beans change ownership – fortunes won or lost in chocolate. You can imagine the mix of thrill and agony: winning a mound of tasty currency, or losing your pocket’s worth of tomorrow’s meals in one toss. In any case, cacao made the stakes tangible. (At least if you lost all your money, you could console yourself by drinking chocolate, if you saved a bit of it!)

Tribute and Taxes Paid in Chocolate

Money isn’t just used to trade – it’s also collected by rulers. And in Mesoamerica, chocolate was on the tax list. The Aztec and Maya economies were agrarian but had formal systems of tribute (taxes) imposed by kings on their subjects or conquered towns. Because cacao beans were so valuable and widely accepted, they became a crucial part of tribute payments. Subjects literally paid their taxes in chocolate beans.

Aztec records (many recorded in pictographic codices) give us a detailed look at this chocolate taxation. The Codex Mendoza, a post-conquest manuscript recording Aztec life and tribute, includes pages illustrating the yearly tribute from various provinces of the Aztec Empire. One such province was Xoconochco (Soconusco), a hot coastal region legendary for its prime cacao orchards. According to the Codex Mendoza, Soconusco was obliged to send an eye-popping 200 loads of cacao beans to the imperial treasury every year. Aztec artists depicted this with bundles of beans tied in sacks, each marked with the Aztec symbol for 20 (a flag icon) repeated in sets – essentially a graphic accounting ledger in cacao. In total, the artwork shows two enormous heaps of cacao beans with five little flags above each (five times twenty = 100 bundles per heap, two heaps = 200 bundles). It’s a vivid image of just how much chocolate wealth flowed from the provinces to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.

Tribute in cacao was not limited to Soconusco. Many other regions paid the Aztec Empire in chocolate currency as part of their annual dues, often thousands upon thousands of beans at a time. The king of Texcoco, an allied city-state of the Aztecs, was said to receive over 11 million cacao beans in tribute each year from subordinate towns! This astonishing amount was partially used to supply the royal court’s chocoholics – Texcoco’s ruler consumed nearly 2 million beans worth of chocolate for his own household’s drinks and festivities – and the remaining 9 million beans went into state storage to be spent on other needs of the kingdom. In effect, chocolate beans filled the royal treasuries much as gold and silver coins filled the coffers of European monarchs.

How did rulers store and manage this chocolate treasure? They kept cacao beans in large sacks or bins, carefully protected from moisture and pests, often in secure storehouses within the palace complex. One Spanish account describes great towers of cacao beans in Aztec storehouses, guarded zealously. The beans were counted in standardized quantities; for instance, 8,000 beans (a xiquipil) were tied up as one sack or bundle. To make accounting easier, beans might be strung together in bunches or sealed in jars once counted. We even have records of tribute lists where, say, “12,000 cacao beans” are listed alongside so many cloth blankets and so many bushels of maize as a town’s yearly obligation. Cacao beans were currency, tax revenue, and strategic reserve all at once.

The Spanish conquerors, upon toppling the Aztec Empire in 1521, quickly realized the value of this unusual money. In the early colonial decades, Spaniards themselves used cacao beans to pay indigenous laborers and to buy local products, essentially plugging into the existing money system. For a while, “chocolate coins” remained legal tender in parts of New Spain. A traveler in the 1540s might have observed Spanish settlers at a market in Guatemala buying chickens or corn with handfuls of cacao alongside native people – coin minting was still in its infancy there, so the beans persisted in everyday use. In fact, as late as the 1600s, cacao beans were used as small change in some parts of Spanish America because official currency was scarce. Chocolate money had truly endured the test of time.

Of course, relying on edible money had its challenges – which the Aztecs and others were well aware of. Cacao beans can decay or get eaten (by insects or rodents) if stored too long. This meant cacao currency had a built-in expiration date. Typically, a dried cacao bean might last a year or a bit more before going bad. If you were an ancient accountant managing a royal cacao vault, you had to practice FIFO (first in, first out) inventory management: use the old beans to pay for goods before they spoil, and keep the new harvest stored for later. This perishability sometimes caused economic trouble. In drought years, for example, the cacao harvest might fail, suddenly shrinking the money supply and driving up prices for beans – a bit like currency inflation. On the other hand, because beans couldn’t be hoarded forever, they encouraged a lively circulation. Stale beans weren’t worth anyone’s trouble, so people spent their “money” rather than let it rot. (Imagine if our cash could expire after a year – we’d be sure to use it!)

Another issue was counterfeiting – yes, even chocolate had counterfeiters! Unscrupulous individuals found clever ways to forge cacao beans to trick buyers. One common scam was to take an empty cacao pod shell or a hollowed-out cacao bean husk, then fill it with dirt, clay, or sand to give it weight, and seal it with wax. These fake beans would be mixed into sacks of real cacao so the deception was hard to spot at a glance. Others crafted dummy beans out of hardened amaranth dough (a grain paste), painted to look like the real thing. In the marketplace, a vendor might slip in a few counterfeit beans as change, hoping the customer wouldn’t notice until later. The problem became significant enough that Aztec officials had to impose penalties for cocoa counterfeiters – essentially early anti-fake-money laws. Archaeologists have even unearthed remains of clay-filled cacao beans from colonial-era sites, confirming that this chocolate forgery was indeed practiced. It’s a testament to how valuable cacao currency was: if something is considered money, people will find a way to fake it!

Interestingly, towards the end of the Aztec era, there were signs of a transition to more conventional currency due to these practical issues. The Aztecs began to cast small copper coins in the shape of mini axe blades, sometimes called “hoe money” or axe-monies. These copper tokens, worth a hefty amount of cacao each, were an attempt to create a more durable currency for large transactions (one copper axe coin might equal 8,000 beans or more). However, this experiment was still limited – right up to the Spanish conquest, cacao beans remained the dominant currency for everyday trade. The allure of chocolate was simply too strong to give up.

Food, Status, and Symbol: The Cultural Power of Cacao

Beyond its monetary and practical use, cacao had huge cultural and symbolic importance in Mesoamerican societies. It wasn’t just money in the bank; it was food for the soul, a drink of the gods, and a mark of prestige. Understanding this deeper meaning helps explain why cacao was trusted as currency – it was revered in almost every aspect of life.

For one, cacao in the form of chocolate (the drink) was the beverage of the elite. Among the Aztec and Maya nobility, drinking chocolate was a grand luxury and a daily pleasure of kings. The thick, foamy cacao drink – often flavored with spices like chili, vanilla, or flor de cacao – was served in beautifully decorated cups. The Aztec emperor Moctezuma II famously would be served 50 golden goblets of chocolate each day, taken reportedly before visiting his harem, as it was thought to be an aphrodisiac. (Whether chocolate truly has that effect is debatable, but the belief certainly elevated its status.) To be able to drink your cacao rather than spend it was the height of wealth. Common folk might only rarely taste chocolate, maybe at festivals or if it was offered by a patron, because it was literally like drinking money. This association of chocolate with status and wealth reinforced everyone’s willingness to accept the beans as money – they knew someone would always desire cacao, either to sip or to save.

Cacao also played central roles in religious rituals and social ceremonies. The Maya, for example, used cacao in marriage negotiations and wedding ceremonies. There was a tradition in some regions of the bride and groom exchanging five cacao beans with each other during the wedding vows, or a father of the bride demanding a dowry partly in cacao from the groom’s family. In the Mixtec culture (of Oaxaca), a codex illustration shows a bride and groom sharing a chalice of chocolate as part of their marriage bond. Here, chocolate symbolized prosperity, fertility, and the bittersweet richness of life – quite appropriate for a union.

In religious offerings, cacao was a common feature as well. Priests and devotees offered cacao beans to the gods by scattering them on temple altars or adding them to sacrificial rituals, almost as sacred currency for divine favor. Some ceremonies included chocolate drinks mixed with sacrificial blood or other potent ingredients, to be consumed by priests in communion with the gods. The Maya Popol Vuh (the book of creation) even describes the gods crafting human beings from a dough that included ground corn and cacao, among other ingredients – literally making mankind partly out of chocolate. In Aztec myth, after humans were created from corn, Quetzalcoatl stole the cacao tree from paradise to gift it to humanity, teaching them how to roast and grind the beans. Such stories show cacao as a heaven-sent substance, a bridge between mortals and the divine.

Another fascinating symbol was the connection between cacao and life force. The Aztecs used chocolate as a metaphor for the heart and blood – the cacao bean’s rich red-brown when ground and mixed with liquid reminded them of blood, the sacred life liquid. They sometimes added achiote (annatto) to redden the chocolate drink, enhancing this symbolism. Chocolate was called “heart blood” in some poetic texts. This life-giving reputation made it all the more precious.

All these cultural layers – the mythology, ritual use, social prestige – meant that cacao beans carried a psychological value beyond their practical worth. People saw them as gifts of the gods and symbols of status, which bolstered their use as a trusted currency. In essence, chocolate was valuable not only because you could eat or drink it, but because it meant something profound in the cultural imagination. Imagine being paid in something that is both your favorite treat and imbued with sacred significance – you’d probably value those payments very highly! That’s exactly how the peoples of Mesoamerica felt about cacao.

The Legacy: Chocolate’s Worth in the Modern World

Today, we no longer pay our rent or taxes in bags of cacao beans. The “chocolate standard” gave way long ago to metal coins, paper bills, and digital money. Yet, the legacy of cacao currency is still felt in how we perceive the value of chocolate. Simply put, we continue to treat chocolate as something special – a symbol of luxury, love, and reward – echoing its exalted status of old.

Think about when we gift chocolate. A box of fine chocolates on Valentine’s Day, a bar of silky dark chocolate as a thank-you, or a cup of rich hot cocoa on a chilly night – these carry a sense of indulgence and care. We instinctively know chocolate is a little treasure (for the tongue and the heart), perhaps not realizing that for centuries it was literally treasured as money. Phrases like “worth its weight in chocolate” aren’t common – but we do say “worth its weight in gold,” and in Mesoamerica gold and chocolate were nearly equivalent in worth. In fact, the Spanish who first encountered cacao beans being used as coins had to adjust their European mindset; they eventually wrote that a sack of cacao could buy a horse or that a single bean could buy a meal. That astonishment has faded, but the sense of chocolate as a precious commodity remains.

In a way, every time you enjoy a piece of chocolate, you’re holding a fragment of that history. The addictive delight you feel has deep roots. This was a flavor and substance so esteemed that it powered trade networks and formed the backbone of kingdoms. Knowing that chocolate was once money might make you savor it even more – it’s like nibbling on something that was literally priceless to our ancestors.

There’s even a playful truth to the joke, “money grows on trees”, when it comes to chocolate. The cacao tree really did grow money on its branches in the form of those cocoa pods. Perhaps that’s why we find something magical about strolling through a chocolate shop or a cacao plantation – subconsciously, we’re tapping into an ancient dream of plucking riches from a tree. In an economic sense, cacao is still a huge global commodity (a multi-billion dollar industry), and some farmers call the crop “brown gold.” We no longer carry jute bags of cacao to the bank, but the global trade of chocolate is a serious business built on people’s enduring love for this product.

The story of cocoa currency also offers a lesson: money is ultimately about shared belief in value. The Aztecs and Maya proved that anything can be money – even something as perishable and enjoyable as chocolate – if everyone agrees on its worth. In modern times we’ve seen similar things, like cigarettes used as currency in prisons or certain virtual game tokens taking on real monetary value. Cacao beans were an early example of alternative currency that worked surprisingly well in its context. It reminds us that behind our abstract currencies today lies a shared cultural story of value, not unlike the story that made chocolate into money.

Lastly, consider how we often talk about chocolate in language fit for riches: “rich chocolate cake,” “decadent truffles,” “luxurious cocoa butter”. We don’t describe broccoli or bread with such exalted terms. That linguistic flourish is, in a sense, the cultural memory of cacao’s exalted place. Chocolate = luxury in our minds, just as it did for the Aztec nobility and Maya kings. When we splurge on gourmet chocolate, we become part of a long tradition of chocolate as a status symbol and cherished treasure.

So the next time you unwrap a chocolate bar, take a moment to appreciate that you’re enjoying something that once functioned as coins in a marketplace and tribute to emperors. Those Mesoamerican chocoholics would surely smile to see their beloved cacao now circling the globe, still adored and still indulgent – even if we’ve moved on to credit cards and cryptocurrencies. In a world of changing currencies, chocolate’s value remains a constant: measured not in beans anymore, but in the delight it brings. And in that sense, the spirit of the cocoa currency lives on, whenever chocolate lovers trade a bit of their wealth for a taste of heaven.