The Aztecs and Mayans used chocolate beans as money to buy food and pay taxes.

In the Aztec Empire during the 1400s and 1500s, cacao beans were official money. Spanish records from 1545 show that a small rabbit cost 30 beans. A large turkey was worth 200 beans. A single egg cost 3 beans.The beans were good for trade because they were small and easy to carry. They were hard to fake, but some people tried. These people would empty the bean shells and fill them with dirt or clay to trick others.The Aztec leader Moctezuma II kept a huge supply of this money. His warehouse held over 960 million beans at one time. The empire collected these beans as taxes from people in tropical areas where the trees grew.Cacao trees only grow in hot, rainy places. Since the Aztec capital was in a dry valley, they had to import every bean. This scarcity kept the value of the beans high for hundreds of years.People used beans as money even after Spanish explorers arrived. There were not enough metal coins, so the beans stayed useful. Traders counted them in groups of 20 or large bags of 8,000.