In 1895 Daniel Peter changed the way the world consumed chocolate.
Up until this point, we had solid dark chocolate that people were already loving, but the market was very competitive.
Wanting to make a name for himself and completely change the game of chocolate Daniel Peter spent years trying to milk chocolate with milk, but as there is a significant amount of fat in chocolate, and milk has a high water content, it wasn't easy to get the two ingredients to come together.
After many many attempts, failures, and experimenting, he finally managed to evaporate enough water from the milk to mix the ingredients successfully. BUT in less than a week it had turned sour.
While discussing one day with a neighbour and friend, Henri Nestle - at the time producing baby food - Daniel found out that Henri was experiencing a similar problem, so they put their minds together and again after much experiments Henri was able to extract almost all the water content from the milk and Daniel mixed it with there chocolate - making the first milk chocolate in 1875.
The recipe was refined and Daniel continued to work on it until he was finial happy with it and the shelf life was of an acceptable length.
As the product spread Europe and then America it didn't take long for the world to fall in love with this new creamy milk chocolate!
And there you have it, how milk chocolate came to be. The recipe originally used by Daniel is apparently still used to create 'peter's chocolate'. However, the majority of the world has refined this recipe and is producing the chocolate we have today - including us, in our milk chocolate assortment.
Just as a disclaimer - while researching this is I did find an article that claims that Daniel was the sole inventor and that Nestle only became a business partner at a later stage - but I will leave you to explore that yourself if you wish.
Source - belgianandfinechocolates.com