The first chocolate Easter eggs were made in Europe in the early 19th Century. A type of eating chocolate had been invented a few years earlier but it could not be successfully moulded. Most of the eggs in the earlier years were solid as they started to experiment with creating hollow eggs. 

John Cadbury made his first ‘French eating Chocolate’ in 1842, however it was not until 1875 that the first Cadbury Easter Eggs were made due to Cadbury not impressed with continental eggs enough to believe he needed to compete. In fact, progress in the chocolate Easter egg market was very slow until a method was found of making the chocolate flow into the moulds. The modern chocolate Easter egg with its smoothness, shape and flavour owes its progression to the two greatest developments in the history of chocolate – the invention of a press for separating cocoa butter from the cocoa bean by the Dutch inventor Van Houten in 1828 and the introduction of a pure cocoa by Cadbury Brothers in 1866. The Cadbury process made large quantities of cocoa butter available and this was the secret of making moulded chocolate or indeed, any fine eating chocolate. The earliest Cadbury chocolate eggs were made of ‘dark’ chocolate with a plain smooth surface and were filled with dragees.