1. Does chocolate contribute to intellectual superiority? Perhaps. Eat up, because there is a positive correlation between the amount of chocolate a country consumes and the number of Nobel Laureates that country has produced.

2. How's this for versatility: the blood in Psycho's famous shower scene was in fact chocolate syrup.

3. Let's talk complex flavors: chocolate has over 600 different flavor compounds. Red wine? A measly 200.

4. More than an explosion of flavor: Nazis once plotted to kill Winston Churchill with an exploding bar of chocolate.

5. Labor intensive: It takes a cocoa tree nearly a full year to product enough pods to make just ten standard-sized chocolate bars.

6. What would you do for chocolate? A jewel thief in Belgium pulled off a $28 million heist after reportedly gaining the trust of the bank's guards by offering them chocolate.

7. For 90% of its history chocolate was consumed as a liquid – not a solid.

8. Sweet poison: the compound theobromine, found in chocolate, makes it dangerous for dogs. And it could kill a human, too, but only in a tremendous fit of gluttony, as an average 10-year-old child would have to eat 1,900 Hershey's miniature milk chocolates in a single sitting to reach a fatal dose.

9. Soldiers were sometimes paid in chocolate during the Revolutionary War.

10. Royal drink: Aztec emperor Montezuma II drank over 50 cups of chocolate every day.

11. Old school: Pre-Columbian societies are said to have mixed many materials with chocolate, including ground dinosaur fossils.

12. Not about space: The Milky Way candy bar was not named after our galaxy. Instead, the name was meant to invoke the flavor of a malted milkshake.

Stop by our downtown St Paul chocolate shop to discover more secrets about chocolate's magic.