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Ruth Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie in 1938 at her Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts.
Prior to her new creation, Wakefield served a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream at her restaurant.
While preparing her Butter Drop Do cookie recipe, she chopped a semi-sweet Nestlé chocolate bar into pieces and added them to the dough.
She found that the chocolate maintained its shape when baking the cookies.
This was the birth of the chocolate chip cookie.
In 1938, Ruth Wakefield introduced her chocolate chip cookie recipe to America when she published her cookbook “Ruth Wakefield’s Toll House Tried and True Recipes.”
Her recipe became famous nationally when soldiers received these cookies in World War II care packages.
In March 1939, Wakefield struck an interesting deal with Nestlé.
She allowed them to print her “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie” recipe on their chocolate bar wrappers in exchange for $1 and a lifetime supply of chocolate.
By 1941, Nestlé introduced pre-cut chocolate chips, eliminating the need for manual chocolate chopping and ensuring consistent chocolate distribution in cookies.
The move standardized chocolate chip cookie baking in kitchens across America.
Other chocolate manufacturers, like The Hershey Company, would later follow suit with their own versions.
The Toll House Inn operated successfully until New Year’s Eve 1984 when a suspected arson fire destroyed the building completely.
Today, while retail stores occupy the site, a plaque and the restored original sign mark where Ruth Wakefield’s culinary invention transformed American baking history.
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