Commodity racism and semiotics in chocolate advertising: the case of Chocolates Amatller, 1914

The golden age of the illustrated poster, spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reshaped how consumer products were imagined, desired and consumed. Posters became persuasive instruments that promoted goods while projecting lifestyles, identities and fantasies. In the bustling streets of modern cities, they turned walls into open-air stages, where vibrant colours and monumental scale captured the fleeting gaze of passers-by. As one of the most seductive media of its time, the poster distilled aspiration into a single image, shaping the visual language of modern consumption.

Few commodities captured the symbolic and visual potential of advertising more fully than chocolate. Sourced through imperial trade routes and colonial economies yet consumed as a bourgeois indulgence, chocolate operated simultaneously as a material good and an ideological sign. Its marketing often drew on romanticised depictions of origin, servitude and exoticism, heightening the product’s desirability while concealing the realities of its supply.

This article draws on the concept of commodity racism (McClintock, 1995; King, 2009; Hund et al., 2013), which describes how visual and rhetorical strategies in consumer culture embed racial ideologies ^[1] into everyday goods. Rather than conveying explicit political messages, these representations relied on affect, repetition and aesthetic appeal to render racial difference as pleasurable, humorous or exotic. Focusing on a case study of chocolate advertising in Spain during the 1910s, this research examines how race was constructed, aestheticised and commodified within a broader context of consumer desire and imperial fantasy.

Scholars have shown how chocolate advertising in Britain, France and Germany used racialised imagery to promote brands and construct fantasies of order, hierarchy and refinement (Ramamurthy, 2003; Robertson, 2007, 2013; Hackenesch, 2011, 2014, 2017). From cheerful plantation scenes in Cadbury’s cocoa campaigns to the iconic Banania figure in France and the Sarotti Mohr in Germany, these advertisements transformed racialised figures into consumable symbols of sweetness and subservience. Although Spain shared many of the same imperial and commercial dynamics (Jou-Badal, 2026), its chocolate advertising practices have received comparatively little scholarly attention.

This article foregrounds the case of Chocolates Amatller to show how a Spanish chocolatier deployed racialised imagery in its branding strategy. In 1914, the company organised a national advertising contest to promote its new product, Chocolates Amatller Marca Luna. With nearly 600 submissions and six awarded designs, the contest became the most ambitious poster competition in Spain at the time. Among the top winners were three posters depicting racialised figures: a black man in servant attire carrying a pot of chocolate, a Japanese woman surrounded by cherry blossoms and another black man holding a chocolate-serving tray alongside parrots. These were not isolated artistic choices but part of Amatller’s wider visual repertoire, reproduced across packaging, publicity materials and outdoor hoardings.

Chocolates Amatller has previously appeared in the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, as part of an examination of its use of visual ephemera, particularly mid-20th-century collectable cards and press advertising aimed at children (Aramendia-Muneta, 2020). This article builds on that established relevance while pursuing a different analytical trajectory. Rather than focusing on sales promotion or market segmentation, it examines an earlier moment in the company’s history and shifts attention to illustrated poster advertising as a site for the construction of racial meaning. By analysing posters produced during the early 20th century, the study foregrounds race, empire and visual culture as central dimensions of Amatller’s branding strategy, thereby extending existing scholarship on the firm into a new conceptual and historical domain.

Within historical marketing scholarship, there has been a growing interest in complementing firm-centred narratives with analyses that foreground culture, meaning and the social dimensions of marketing practices (Schwarzkopf, 2015). Recent contributions have demonstrated how visual and semiotic methodologies can be used to analyse the ways in which marketing imagery communicates social difference and cultural norms over time (O’Hagan, 2022; Minowa, 2024; Kenalemang-Palm, 2025). At the same time, marketing history has increasingly recognised Spain as a meaningful context for examining the historical development of advertising and branding practices, situating Iberian cases within broader international debates (Aramendia-Muneta et al., 2024a, 2024b).

The study adopts a semiotic methodology, drawing on Eco’s (1979) and Barthes’s (1964) frameworks alongside Rose’s (2001) critical approach, to analyse the posters across four interpretive levels: iconic (what is shown), iconographic (cultural references), tropological (metaphors and oppositions) and enthymemic (implicit social assumptions). This layered reading highlights how race operates both as visual content and as stylistic form – stylised, commodified and configured to align with bourgeois ideals of pleasure, order and refinement.

The article is organised into six sections. It begins by situating the research within existing literature on commodity racism and chocolate advertising. This is followed by a contextual overview of Chocolates Amatller, with particular attention to its marketing strategies and a discussion of Spain’s illustrated poster culture culminating in the 1914 competition. The methodology section outlines the semiotic framework used for analysis. The core of the article presents a close reading of three prize-winning posters. Finally, the conclusion reflects on how racialised imagery shaped the visual identity of the Spanish chocolatier and considers its wider implications for understanding race, advertising and visual culture at both national and international levels.

One of the foundational formulations of racial commodification in consumer culture appears in bell hooks’ chapter “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” (1992), which argues that racial difference has been transformed into a consumable delight, where “ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks, 1992, p. 21). The appeal of racialised Otherness lies not in political solidarity or historical understanding, but in the exoticism, novelty and aestheticised pleasure it offers to dominant consumers.

The term “commodity racism” was later coined by McClintock (1995) to describe how racial ideologies became embedded in consumer goods, transforming the narrative of imperial progress into mass-produced consumer spectacles, particularly through late Victorian advertising. Discourses of imperial cleanliness, whiteness and civility were inscribed into domestic products, turning everyday acts of consumption into symbolic performances of racial power (McClintock, 1995, p. 164). Expanding this definition, Hund et al. (2013) conceptualise commodity racism in colonial-era advertising as the structural and symbolic entanglement of racism, functioning as a tool to “buttress the working class against social discontent” by offering whiteness as a surrogate form of belonging (p. 15).

Contemporary scholarship on consumer culture has increasingly emphasised the persistence and adaptability of commodity racism across historical periods. King (2009) argued that racialised imagery has not disappeared from advertising but has been reworked through nostalgic or “heritage” branding, in which stereotypes are softened and aestheticised to evoke authenticity. Similarly, Shabbir et al. (2023) showed how multicultural or “woke” branding often transmogrifies, rather than dismantles, colonial stereotypes, preserving racial hierarchies beneath inclusive language. Advertising theory has further clarified that race in marketing operates less through explicit ideological statements than through aesthetic regimes that shape perception, affect and desire. Thomas et al. (2023) framed advertising as a historically situated meaning-making system in which race is discursively produced and materially consequential, yet most commonly encountered through visual and sensory forms.

Within this aesthetic logic, the advertising of colonial products has been examined for how it articulated racial ideologies. In Britain, from the 1880s onwards, soap campaigns by Pears and Monkey Brand portrayed hygiene not only as a personal virtue but also as a metaphor for racial uplift, often relying on infantilising and caricatured depictions of non-white figures (McClintock, 1995, 2005; Hund et al., 2013). Similar dynamics appeared in food marketing, as in Huntley & Palmers’ biscuits advertising, which depicted a group of British colonials seated on biscuit crates in the jungle, sipping tea – transforming imperial occupation into a spectacle of leisure and entitlement (McClintock, 1995). In the USA, between the 1910s and 1930s, racialised brand mascots such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and the Cream of Wheat chef functioned as nostalgic emblems of slavery and domestic servitude, offering white consumers a sense of comfort grounded in visual codes of subservience (Kern-Foxworth, 1994).

Historiography on chocolate advertising combines the visual logics of colonial commodities and aspirational food marketing. Sourced from colonised tropical regions and dependent on racialised labour, chocolate was often framed through imagery of exotic origin and Black servitude. At the same time, its status as a sweet indulgence invited tropes of innocence, delight and emotional appeal.

In Britain, during the early 1900s, Cadbury’s advertising responded to mounting anxieties following revelations about forced labour on the São Tomé cocoa plantations (Ramamurthy, 2003). To reassure consumers, the company reframed cocoa as the product of seemingly willing African labour, illustrated through multiple materials featuring cheerful Black figures in romanticised plantation settings (Ramamurthy, 2003; Robertson, 2013). Even into the 1930s, the company campaigns continued to depict racialised labourers, including faceless African women carrying cocoa baskets – figures stripped of identity and reinforcing gendered and racialised tropes of servitude (Robertson, 2013). Rowntree followed similar visual logics, incorporating several racialised representations. In 1922, the character known as the Cocoa Nib appeared in shop window displays: a smiling, barefoot black boy wearing dungarees and carrying an oversized cocoa pod (Robertson, 2013). More widely circulated in the post-war era were the animated characters Little Coco (1946), dressed as a Boy Scout and shown engaging in adventurous tasks in exoticised colonial landscapes and Honeybunch (1947), a feminised and Americanised figure who, in colour illustrations, appeared with light skin, blue eyes and hair ribbons. Her dialogue – “Feelin’ kinda hungry? Me, I’d have a cuppa Rowntree’s”, echoed tropes drawn from minstrel traditions and plantation nostalgia (Robertson, 2007, 2013).

In the early 1910s, French chocolate advertising portrayed blackness as exotic, playful and culturally other, blending colonial fantasy with bourgeois domesticity and visual humour. Chocolat Menier featured a smiling black domestic servant on its packaging, encoding racial hierarchy within a scene of household harmony, while a poster for Félix Potin grocery stores depicted a Black man gazing into a mirror, comparing his skin tone to a chocolate bar – an overt visual pun on race (Terrio, 2000, p. 264). Yet no campaign proved more enduring or controversial than Banania. Introduced in 1915, the brand replaced an earlier image of an Antillean woman with a Senegalese infantryman in the French army, smiling and holding a steaming bowl of chocolate. The accompanying slogan, “Y’a bon”, written in stylised pidgin French, became the brand’s identity and was reproduced for decades across posters, packaging and promotional materials (Donadey, 2000). Contemporary analyses have interpreted the Banania character as an iconic synecdoche for the Black Other as grand enfant, whose stylised speech and cheerful demeanour reinforced infantilised and racialised stereotypes (Hund et al., 2013), while simultaneously linking cocoa consumption to narratives of patriotic service and colonial obedience (Imani, 2019).

Germany also offers a long-standing case of racialised branding through the figure of the Sarotti Mohr. Created in 1918 by the Berlin chocolatier, the mascot portrayed a small Black child dressed in colourful Orientalist garb – turban, bloomers and curled slippers – carrying a tray of sweets (Hackenesch, 2011). This blend of African skin and Middle Eastern costume blurred colonial geographies and repackaged racial imagery. After disappearing during the Nazi period, when chocolate was deemed too foreign and un-German, the figure re-emerged in the 1950s and became widely recognised in consumer culture (Hackenesch, 2017). Amid growing criticism from Afro-Germans and anti-racist groups, Sarotti eventually retired the figure in 2004, replacing it with a golden silhouette marketed as the “Magician of the Senses”, an attempt to neutralise its racial connotations while maintaining an aura of the exotic (Hackenesch, 2014).

These historiographical examples across Europe show that chocolate advertising merged the visual registers of colonial spectacle and domestic indulgence. Blackness was repeatedly portrayed as decorative, infantilised or obedient, concealing the exploitative realities of cocoa production while using racial difference to enhance consumer fantasy. This dual symbolic function positioned chocolate as a product of empire, and as a site of everyday pleasure, where racial hierarchies were naturalised through sweetness, familiarity and spectacle.

Against this European backdrop, recent research suggests that Spanish consumer culture likewise relied on racialised visual codes, even if these have rarely been examined through the framework of commodity racism. Studies of early 20th-century Spanish visual culture indicate that advertising and mass-market imagery frequently mobilised simplified black–white binaries, embedding hierarchies of whiteness and blackness within images designed to generate desire, familiarity and visual pleasure. Lindsay-Perez (2024) showed that such imagery circulated widely across Spanish advertising for everyday consumer goods – including foodstuffs, household products, leisure commodities and popular entertainment – translating Spain’s complex racial history into easily legible visual oppositions that proved particularly effective in commercial contexts.

This insight complements Goode’s (2009) analysis of racial thought in Spain, which highlights the instability of racial categories and the strategic celebration of mestizaje within intellectual and scientific discourse between 1870 and 1930. It also resonates with Feros’s (2017) account of how race and national identity in the Hispanic world were articulated primarily through cultural, moral and civilisational idioms rather than explicit biological hierarchies. Similarly, Martin-Márquez (2008) showed how African colonial spaces functioned as sites for performing and aestheticising racial differences within metropolitan identity formation. Taken together, this scholarship suggests that while racial ideology in Spain was articulated cautiously at the level of theory, consumer culture provided a more permissive arena in which racial difference could be aestheticised, normalised and commodified. Yet the role of advertising for colonial commodities – such as chocolate – has remained largely unexplored in the Spanish case, leaving a gap in the historiography of commodity racism.

Chocolates Amatller was founded in Barcelona in 1797, when Gabriel Amatller, a member of a well-off peasant family from Molins de Rei, entered the city’s chocolate grinders’ guild. The company’s early growth was driven by trade in colonial goods such as cocoa, sugar, coffee and tea, particularly across eastern Spain (Nadal and Tafunell, 1992). This expansion was supported by strategic family alliances and an expanding network of commercial contacts.

The second generation, operating under the name Hermanos Amatller, maintained artisanal chocolate production while gradually adopting imported machinery during the broader wave of chocolate industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century. At this stage, the firm’s branding discourse in printed newspapers focused more on technical and industrial achievements rather than constructing a distinctive visual identity (Jou-Badal, 2026). During these years, the company participated in major exhibitions held in Barcelona, such as the Exposición General Catalana (1871) and the Exposición Universal de Barcelona (1888), which served to emphasise product quality, technological innovation and factory modernity. However, marketing remained rooted in regional proximity and product performance rather than in symbolic or aesthetic appeal.

A more proactive visual branding strategy emerged under Antoni Amatller (third generation) who inaugurated a modern steam-powered factory in 1874, driving the company’s expansion in the Spanish market (Nadal and Tafunell, 1992). By the 1880s, the firm began distributing chromolithographic trade cards along with its products – initially imported from Italy and France and later produced in-house with newly acquired printing equipment (Jou-Badal, 2026). Designed by renowned illustrators such as Apel·les Mestres and Alexandre de Riquer, these early collectible cards featured idealised bourgeois women, modernist allegories and aspirational motifs such as automobiles, exotic animals and luxury goods, appealing especially to families and children (López, 2017). The company’s engagement with aspirational culture culminated in 1900 with its centenary poster, commissioned from Alphonse Mucha. His design associated the Amatller brand with refinement, femininity and artistic prestige, aligning it with the leading visual aesthetics of Art Nouveau modernism (Jou-Badal, 2026).

Like other international chocolatiers, Amatller incorporated depictions of racial and cultural difference into its promotional repertoire. This became particularly evident during the fourth generation (Teresa Amatller), and in the 1914 advertising contest – examined in this article – in which three of the six prize-winning posters included such imagery. These motifs were not confined to posters; they also appeared in the company’s chromolithographic collections. During the 1910s, Amatller released illustrated series explaining the history of Spain, including episodes related to former Latin American colonies and military campaigns such as the Hispano–Moroccan War (1859–1860) (Ral, 2007). An additional example of racialised storytelling can be found in the series Las Aventuras de Nick en África Central (The Adventures of Nick in Central Africa), illustrated by I. González, which followed a white explorer routinely accompanied by a loyal black servant, visually dramatising imperial authority through serialised adventure narratives (López, 2017).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the peak of its commercial expansion, Amatller continued issuing chromolithographic cards on a wide range of themes, including literary figures such as Don Quixote, animal cartoons and idealised feminine figures. Yet portrayals of racial and cultural difference remained a recurring element in several collections, such as Las Razas del Color (The Races of Color), a dedicated series on Tarzán, el Rey de los Monos (Tarzan, King of the Apes) and others focused on Spain’s imperial legacy (Rafí, 2023; Ral, 2007). These visual narratives frequently drew on tropes of exoticism, primitivism and colonial nostalgia, reinforcing symbolic associations between whiteness, dominance and heroic adventure.

Although the company had secured a leading position in the Spanish market by the 1930s, escalating political instability brought significant disruption. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the factory was collectivised, interrupting family control and production routines. Ownership returned to Teresa Amatller after the conflict, and the business remained in family hands until her death in 1960. In the following decade, the firm was acquired by Catalan chocolate maker Simón Coll, who continues to market the Chocolates Amatller brand as part of a premium product line.

The illustrated poster emerged in the late 19th century as a hybrid medium of art, publicity and mass communication. Originating in France, it had by the 1880s evolved from a utilitarian notice into a powerful vehicle of visual persuasion and aesthetic spectacle. Artists such as Jules Chéret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha transformed urban walls into open-air galleries, turning commercial imagery into a cultural attraction (Barjau, 2020). Beyond its function as a marketing device, the poster came to operate as a “new speech genre” that addressed the fleeting gaze of modern passers-by, condensing artistic elegance and commercial messaging into a single, instantaneous encounter (Iskin, 2014). Contemporary art critics emphasised its communicative power; as Rogers (1914, p. 190) observed, the most effective posters were those that could “deliver their message with no uncertain voice” while simultaneously appealing to “the imagination of the spectator”.

In Spain, the illustrated poster gained momentum at the dawn of the century, finding particularly fertile ground in Barcelona, where industrialisation, a dynamic publishing sector, and a flourishing artistic scene converged (Barjau, 2020). Influenced by French Art Nouveau and the English Arts and Crafts movement, Catalan artists such as Alexandre de Riquer and Ramon Casas adapted the international idiom to local themes and visual traditions (Salom, 1979).

Beyond its role as an innovative advertising format, the illustrated poster quickly became a site of cultural production and public engagement. From the late 1890s onward, several Spanish manufacturers began organising poster competitions to commission artworks from both emerging and established artists. These events transformed commercial publicity into a form of juried artistic expression, elevating brand identity while participating in broader debates about aesthetics, taste and modernity. The first documented example was the Anís del Mono competition of 1897, organised by the makers of the well-known Catalan anisette liqueur, which awarded 500 pesetas for a winning design by Casas, featuring a flamenco-style woman posing beside the brand’s trademark monkey. The poster exemplified a form of gendered exoticism and popular-bourgeois hybridity, blending familiar visual codes with refined artistic style to appeal simultaneously to elite taste and mass-market familiarity (García-Fernández, 1985).

This competition model was followed by Codorníu in 1898, a leading producer of sparkling wine (cava), which offered a 1,500-peseta first prize and attracted 173 entries. The winning design by Tubilla featured a well-dressed bourgeois couple enjoying cava in an elegant setting, visually aligning the brand with ideals of affluence, leisure and modern consumer sophistication (Salom, 1979). Further poster competitions became increasingly visible in both Barcelona and Madrid, such as those organised by the Círculo de Bellas Artes (1898), Caja de Previsión y Ahorro (1900), Casa Fiter y Planas (1900), El Liberal (1900) and Blanco y Negro (1901) (García-Fernández, 1985; Barjau, 2020). Winning entries were exhibited in public venues, signalling growing institutional interest in posters as artistic and symbolic media. However, critics occasionally lamented the uneven quality of submissions, foreshadowing a decline in public competitions in the following decade (Salom, 1979).

The first press coverage of the Chocolates Amatller poster contest appeared on 3 March 1914, when a local newspaper announced the company’s call for artists to design promotional posters for its new product, Chocolate Amatller – Marca Luna. The initiative offered an unprecedented 5,000 pesetas for the first prize, ten times the amount awarded in the Anís del Mono contest (1897) and over three times that of Codorníu (1898). The editorial celebrated the initiative as an act of artistic patriotism, praising Amatller for investing in the Spanish artistic community and elevating domestic creativity (L’Hereu, 3 March 1914).

Just over a week later, the detailed terms of the competition were made public. Chocolates Amatller committed a total of 10,000 pesetas to be distributed across six prizes, ranging from 5,000 pesetas for first place to 250 for sixth (El Mundo, 9 March 1914). The contest was open exclusively to Spanish artists, with international participants explicitly excluded. Submissions were required to follow a 1 by 0.65 m format and include the slogan “Chocolate Amatller – Marca Luna” and artists retained full creative freedom in both subject and technique (El Correo Español, 18 March 1914). The appointed jury consisted of local intellectuals and artists: Apel·les Mestres, Maurici Vilomara, Miguel Utrillo, Manuel Rodríguez Codolà and Joaquín Folch i Torres. The submission deadline was set for 30 May 1914 (Gent Nova, 14 March 1914).

The results of the competition were announced in June, with the press highlighting its unprecedented scale and professional execution. A total of 590 entries were received, surpassing all previous national and international poster contests (El Diario Español, 12 June 1914). The first prize was awarded to Rafael de Penagos for India, a poster depicting a black servant presenting a cup of chocolate, which is examined in detail in this study. The second prize went to Miguel Soldevila Valls for Galantería, featuring a modern young woman enjoying chocolate in a bar. Josep Triadó Mallol received the third prize for Marihira, a stylised portrayal of a Japanese woman stirring chocolate, also analysed in this research. Penagos was again recognised with the fourth prize for Afrodita, a composition with a harlequin and a ballet dancer. The fifth prize, titled Tico, was awarded to Vicente Climent for a domestic scene featuring a chocolate grinder, notably devoid of racialised imagery. The sixth prize went to Francisco de A. Galí for Bateig, which portrayed another black servant carrying a tray of chocolate and constitutes the third case study in this analysis.

The award-winning posters, along with a large selection of additional entries, were exhibited at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Barcelona, attracting considerable public attention and extensive press coverage. Commentators praised the initiative for its seriousness and transparency, noting that the jury’s decision had not sparked the usual controversy that often accompanied such competitions (La Publicidad, 17 June 1914). The contest was hailed as unprecedented in both quality and ambition, emphasising its symbolic value for the Amatller brand and its galvanising effect on young Spanish artists (El Diluvio, 29 June 1914). Even satirical commentary engaged with the event: one columnist joked that Luna chocolate must have performed miracles, given the abundance of decorative offerings on display (L’Hereu, 2 July 1914).

In reviews of the submitted works, critics singled out Rafael de Penagos’s India for acclaim, citing its vivid colour, elegant composition and strong visual impact as exemplary qualities in poster design (La Publicidad, 27 June 1914). Yet that same review also highlighted systemic weaknesses across the participants, noting that many entries suffered from “mannerism, clumsiness, and lack of originality”, with some undermined by excessive shading and overcrowded linework.

A retrospective assessment of the competition offered a more conceptual reading of India, recognising both its technical execution and aesthetic ambition (La Patria, 29 March 1915). The critic observed that Penagos had achieved a striking fusion of national and classical codes, writing that “the castizo type of indigenous attire has been successfully fused with the noble poise of a classical figure”, thus avoiding “vulgar populist bravado” and instead attaining “a dignified elegance of posture and spirit”. This rhetorical framing by the critic suggests that Penagos’s portrayal of the racialised servant figure was not merely exoticised but aesthetically elevated, reinterpreted through visual harmony and bourgeois codes of decorum. From this perspective, the advertisement could operate simultaneously as a vehicle of commercial persuasion and cultural aspiration.

To address the objectives set out in this study, we adopted a semiotic analysis approach applied to a selection of finalist posters from the Chocolates Amatller competition. This approach is particularly relevant for the analysis of graphic advertising, as it allows us to consider both the visual and textual elements. As Gillian Rose (2001) observed, semiotic analysis provides access to the conceptual richness and symbolic density of images, which in this case is essential for interpreting the posters in the competition.

Because racial representation emerged as a central theme in both the competition and its contemporary press coverage, the sample was restricted to those designs that explicitly depicted racialised figures. The analytical corpus therefore comprises three prize-winning posters: India by Rafael de Penagos, which received first prize; Marihira by Josep Triadó Mallol, awarded third prize; and Bateig by Francisco de A. Galí, which secured sixth prize. The analysis focuses on how racialisation is constructed in these images when promoting a colonial commodity such as chocolate. More specifically, it examines the ideological frameworks mobilised by artists – and, by extension, advertisers – in shaping meanings about the product, its consumption and its visual presentation.

The semiotic approach highlights how advertising discourse was articulated in a way presumed to be intelligible to the public, appealing to their cultural repertoires and interpretive frameworks (Eco, 1979) to provoke affective responses, such as purchase behaviour (Phillips and McQuarrie, 2004). From this perspective, advertising posters function as sign systems that extend beyond their literal content to reference broader cultural and ideological structures (Rose, 2001; Freire, 2014). As García-López and Cabezuelo-Lorenzo (2016) emphasised, advertising often encodes these meanings in concealed or coded forms, making semiotics especially useful for their critical deconstruction.

Building on this premise, the present study adopts semiotics as theorised by Eco (1979, 1989, 1992, 1994) and Roland Barthes (1964) as a foundational analytical tradition. Eco’s contribution is central due to his model of interpretation, which conceptualises meaning as the outcome of an interaction between textual structures and culturally situated interpretive codes, making it especially suited to the analysis advertising discourse. Barthes’ work complements this perspective by foregrounding the ideological dimension of signification, particularly through his analysis of myth and the naturalisation of cultural meanings, which is essential for examining how advertising imagery normalises specific values and worldviews. By combining Eco’s and Barthes’ approaches the aim is to account for both the structural organisation of meaning and its ideological effects within marketing communication.

These theoretical premises are complemented by later methodological contributions that enable their systematic application to visual advertising materials. Gillian Rose’s (2001) distinction between denotation, connotation and broader systems of meaning is employed as an analytical foundation that allows for a structured interpretive sequence, while Martine Joly’s (2005) emphasis on visual connotation provides additional methodological precision for analysing the rhetorical and symbolic dimensions of advertising images.

From these sources, a four-level interpretive grid was developed distinguishing four analytical levels: iconic; iconographic; tropological/rhetorical; and enthymemic. This methodological scheme is further developed in a forthcoming article (Jou-Badal and Martin-Vicario, 2025) and has been refined through subsequent scholarly debate on its relevance for visual studies.

It is important to acknowledge the limits of this approach. Semiotic analysis primarily provides access to what may be described as the grammars of production but does not enable a full reconstruction of the grammars of reception. In other words, a semiotic approach can be effective to identify dominant or preferred meanings encoded in advertising imagery used by advertisers, artists and brands in the construction of meaning. However, it cannot determine how contemporary audiences actually perceived these visual messages in specific historical contexts. To partially address this asymmetry and mitigate interpretive bias, the analysis has been complemented with auxiliary sources, including paratextual materials such as contemporary press reviews and advertising commentary, as well as metatextual scholarship on commodity racism and imperialist visual culture (e.g., McClintock, 1995; Hund et al., 2013). These materials are used here to contextualise and enrich interpretation, but remain secondary, as the focus of the study is the representation of race and the visual strategies deployed in the promotion of Chocolate Amatller – Marca Luna. The name of the brand itself is significant: luna means “moon” in Spanish, a motif that – as the analysis shows – was deliberately echoed by the artists in their poster designs.

As outlined in the Methods, this section offers a close reading of three posters submitted to the 1914 Chocolates Amatller competition for the Marca Luna chocolate line in Barcelona. Although produced within a specifically Spanish context, their visual and discursive strategies align closely with broader European advertising conventions of the period, shaped by a shared colonial horizon in which racialisation and exoticisation endowed chocolate with meanings of luxury, pleasure and bourgeois domesticity (see Hund et al., 2013). The production of images linked to chocolate in Europe cannot be understood without reference to a shared colonial background, in which racialisation and exoticisation became fundamental tools for endowing the product with meanings of luxury, pleasure and bourgeois domesticity:

Spain’s particular historical conjuncture also matters. Until the 1870s, most cocoa imported into Spain came from Ecuador and Venezuela. As relations with former colonies deteriorated, imports shifted towards Equatorial Guinea – especially the island of Fernando Póo – so that by the early 20th century Guinean cocoa accounted for over 90% of total imports (Jou-Badal, 2026). This is why the discourse of empire persisted in the cultural imagination, despite Spain’s loss of most colonies and found expression in contemporary advertising. Amatller’s posters, as will be exposed, directly engaged with European imperial iconography and reproduced many of its representational logics.

For analytical clarity, Bateig by Francisco A. Galí (Figure 1) and India by Rafael de Penagos (Figure 2) are examined together, while Marihira by Josep Triadó (Figure 3) is analysed separately. Although this ordering does not follow the competition’s sequence, it reflects distinct representational regimes: Bateig and India deploy the trope of the “Black Moor” servant in a position of subordination, whereas Marihira presents an Oriental woman coded with high social status. Reading them in this way foregrounds how intersections of race, gender and class structure the posters’ discursive variations and the different paths by which Marca Luna is endowed with aspirational meaning.

In Bateig (Baptism in Catalan) (Figure 1), Francisco A. Galí depicts a full-length black servant dressed in loose-fitting garments and a white turban adorned with an inverted crescent moon. His body is shown in motion, one leg stepping forward and his torso turning, which gives the figure dynamism and theatricality. In his hands, he holds a metal tray with a chocolate pot and two cups, while two large tropical birds flutter around him. The background suggests an open architectural space, with balustrades and blurred human figures faintly visible. The vivid colours of the servant stand out against the lighter palette of the setting, clearly establishing him as the protagonist of the scene.

This figure corresponds to the iconography of the “Black Moor” in 19-century European visual culture. The turban and ornate clothing evoke a stylised and exoticised North Africa, while the dark skin associates him with enslaved labour on cocoa plantations. As Hirinschen (2013) described, the Moor’s iconography was often reduced to decorative attributes that signified both exoticism and subordination. Within this framework, the tropical birds function as a metonym for the exotic, reinforcing the association between chocolate, tropical nature and luxury. At the same time, the chocolate pot and cups point to bourgeois domesticity, as these utensils were typical of wealthy households in which the consumption of chocolate signified refinement.

On a rhetorical level, the servant acts simultaneously as metaphor and synecdoche. His body becomes a signifier that condenses the exoticism, sensuality and luxury associated with chocolate. At the same time, he stands as a synecdoche for Africa and the racialised labour that sustained European consumption. The poster thus reduces an entire continent, its people and their exploitation to the single image of a servant. A rhetorical contradiction also emerges: the servant is a sign of civilisation (domestic service in an elite household) and, at the same time, of untamed nature (his skin colour, the birds, the spectacle of noise and movement). This tension situates him in a liminal zone of “non-civilisation”, never fully attaining white modernity. As McClintock (1995) argued, such racialised figures appear not as historical agents but as “commodity spectacles”: visual attractions that legitimise consumption while denying subjecthood.

The textual anchor reinforces this reading. At the bottom of the poster the product brand name appears: Chocolate Amatller – Marca Luna, which fixes the meaning of the scene for the viewer. Although the servant’s turban already bears an inverted crescent moon and he carries utensils for serving chocolate, the text is still required for the viewer to recognise the advertised product. The prominence of the “Luna” brand is further reinforced by the inclusion of an illustrated moon within the lettering.

Rafael de Penagos’ India (Figure 2) presents a simplified variation on this theme. The central figure, also a black Moorish servant, is shown in a three-quarter profile, kneeling and leaning forward while holding a tray with a chocolate pot and three cups. He wears a turban and ornate clothing similar to Galí’s figure, but here he occupies the entire composition against a plain background. The absence of contextual detail sharpens the focus: the diagonal created by the servant’s gaze and the tilt of the tray directs both his and the viewer’s attention squarely towards the product.

In terms of iconography, this poster continues to draw on the motif of the “Black Moor” associated with domestic service. Once again, the turban and ornate clothing evoke a stylised Middle East, while the dark skin signifies the African colonies. The representation of the chocolate pot and cups – as in Bateig – again refers to bourgeois domesticity, but in this case, it assumes a far more prominent role. Thanks to the visual diagonal created by the servant’s gaze and the tilt of the tray, both his attention and that of the viewer are firmly directed towards the product. The absence of contextual elements further reinforces this focus: the scene is no longer one of spectacle, but rather a representation of submissive service.

Rhetorically, the servant functions here less as a metaphor for chocolate and more as a frame for its presentation. As McClintock (1995, p. 221) observed, racialised bodies in imperial advertising are not actors but frames for the display of colonial goods. The kneeling figure, staring intently at the tray, directs the viewer’s gaze to the product, serving as a visual prop. Through hypotyposis, the gesture of serving is dramatised as an everyday act, embodying racial subordination. The same rhetorical contradiction emerges – albeit less explicitly than in Galí’s poster: the Black Moor servant is simultaneously a sign of exoticism (skin colour, clothing) and of civilised domesticity (the role of servant within the household). In this gesture of offering, the servant symbolises Africa presenting chocolate to Europe, which remains absent from the composition but would have been readily inferred within the cultural imagination of contemporary consumers. In this sense, the Black Moor servant exemplifies what Thomas et al. (2023, pp. 622–624) described as racial aesthetics in advertising: visual arrangements through which race is encountered as form, posture and affect, rather than as explicit racial discourse.

The textual elements also function as an anchor. In this case, the scene is framed by inscriptions at both the top and bottom: Chocolate Amatller – the company name – appears at the top, while Marca Luna is placed at the bottom, establishing a hierarchy between corporate brand and specific product line. Unlike Bateig, however, there is no visual reference to the concept of the “moon”; here the association is conveyed entirely through the written text.

When read side by side, Bateig and India reveal the consistency of the use of the Black Moor servant as a racialised trope. At the same time, their differences illuminate how the brand negotiated between spectacle and service in constructing its imagery of chocolate consumption. In both posters, the specificity of the Amatller brand is worth noting. Unlike other European firms – such as the British Cadbury, which owned cocoa plantations – Amatller had no direct involvement in cocoa production. Its brand imagery therefore did not foreground production or origin but instead emphasised the moment of consumption and projected an image of sophistication. As Hackenesch (2014, p. 36) explained, for chocolate to be perceived as attractive and desirable it had to be detached from its material origins and reimagined through a “fantasy of consumption in which the existence of People of Colour is legitimised by their function to work for White consumers”.

Both posters also underscore the use of male figures. Imperial iconography often feminised black men (McClintock, 1995, p. 225), reinforcing the superiority of the white male consumer. By portraying Black men in servile roles within the domestic sphere, these images imposed a double subordination of race and gender. The white consumer, in contrast, could feel reaffirmed in his belonging to an “advanced” civilisation by virtue of this contrast.

As Robertson (2013, p. 174) observed, the presence of the racialised servant also implies responsibility for preparing the drink, thereby perpetuating the fantasy of effortless leisure consumption. Employers remain absent from the frame, allowing viewers to imagine themselves as privileged recipients. Such tropes of domestic service, widespread in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe, merged with the elitist iconography of chocolate to target a growing market, a logic that Spanish advertisers also adopted. Moreover, the choice of a black Moor servant invokes, as Robertson (2013, p. 175, citing Nederveen Pieterse) noted, the narrative of the black eunuch in the harem, which reinforced the sensual appeal of the merchandise. Thus, the servant is not only a mediator of the product but also an eroticised body, introducing a sexualised dimension to chocolate consumption.

This mechanism corresponds to what McClintock (1995, p. 221) identifies in colonial visual culture: Black figures do not appear as historical actors but as frames for the display of colonial products and values. Their presence in advertising reflects not a desire for representation but a logic of instrumentalisation – displayed, but not recognised as subjects. Chocolate and blackness were entwined within the same semiotic regime, traversed by both sexualisation and racialisation (Hackenesch, 2014, p. 35). Both appeared simultaneously as a desired indulgence and as a symbol of vice and excess. In both Bateig and India, the black servant is the only human figure represented, embodying chocolate itself as a synecdoche of exoticism, luxury and contradiction.

As Robertson (2013, p. 176) summarised, such orientalised black figures, like white servants in other advertising contexts, framed cocoa consumption as a luxurious practice of the social elites. At the same time, they lent the product an air of exoticism which, in Britain and increasingly in Spain, was beginning to fade during the transition to mass consumption. Thus, despite their different rhetorical strategies, both posters convey an implicit subordination of Africa to Europe, legitimised and naturalised through the image of the servant delivering chocolate – his labour and its product – to an absent but imagined white consumer. In Galí’s Bateig, the servant is rendered as spectacle and metaphor for chocolate as an exotic status symbol; in Penagos’ India, he functions as a servile mediator, a framework that legitimises European luxury consumption and exploitation.

Descriptively, the poster shows an Oriental woman kneeling in the foreground, dressed in a decorated kimono and styled with a traditional coiffure. She holds a porcelain cup in one hand and a medlar in the other, on which her gaze is fixed. Behind her, a night-time landscape unfolds: a railing opens onto a lake in which a full moon is reflected, while hanging branches frame the scene, creating an atmosphere of intimacy. The composition is organised along an L-shaped axis, formed by the kneeling figure and the moon as a counterweight, which structures the visual arrangement and emphasises the connection between the woman and the product brand (Marca Luna). Light and shadow are also carefully orchestrated: the brightness of the moon contrasts with the female figure, reinforcing the contemplative, nocturnal mood.

Iconographically, the image evokes the motif of the “noble Japanese lady”. The kimono, elaborate hairstyle and white makeup recall Orientalist imagery popular in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The railing, lake and mountains evoke the stylised landscapes of Japanese art, while the moon further heightens the exotic effect. The solitary woman in a silent, bucolic night-time setting conveys the sense of intimacy and seclusion, positioning the viewer as a privileged voyeur.

On the tropological level, the female figure embodies aspirational values of sophistication, elegance and serenity. Her status as an “Oriental lady” adds an exotic dimension that is not tied to the production of chocolate but to its consumption. This marks a shift from the imagery of Galí and Penagos: here the focus moves away from colonial labour and service towards the staging of consumption itself as a cosmopolitan ritual. The woman thus becomes an aspirational metaphor, representing not merely a consumer of chocolate but a model of bourgeois refinement. Through her restrained gesture and tranquil surroundings, she enacts a form of elitist consumption associated with taste and sensitivity. This configuration illustrates how racialisation in advertising can operate through refinement and beauty as much as through servitude, aligning with Thomas et al.’s (2023, p. 624) argument that race in marketing can be communicated through sensory and aesthetic cues that structure aspiration and desire.

The act of consumption is staged in a concrete and vivid way, transforming the scene into a visual spectacle. The woman’s fixed look at the medlar establishes a visual axis that simultaneously directs the viewer’s attention towards the product. This staging works as a form of hypotyposis, turning an ordinary gesture into a heightened representation of refinement. The effect is reinforced by the strong Orientalist aesthetic that permeates the composition. The choice of a noble Japanese lady reflects a deliberate strategy of cultural distinction. The kimono, coiffure and moonlit landscape do not portray Japan itself, but rather a European construction of it as exotic and refined. As Said (1979) observed, the East was represented in the European imagination through feminised attributes – mystery, sensuality and seduction – not unlike the associations projected onto the black body. The Japanese lady in the poster embodies this projection: her delicacy, serenity and carefully composed setting elevate the act of consumption into something refined, cultivated and cosmopolitan. In this sense, and following Said’s ideas, the figure encapsulates the feminisation of the East, appearing passive, serene and static, offered and prepared for the European observer. Within the poster, this logic of Orientalism is heightened, presenting Japan not as an autonomous culture but as a feminised, sensual and domesticated body whose function is to embellish and legitimise the European consumer’s experience.

This reading resonates with what Robertson (2013, p. 174) described as “narratives of feminised luxury in a white world”, which also appeared in Bateig and India. Although the scene appears detached from colonial production, it is nonetheless permeated by it, presenting the Oriental woman as the bearer of an exoticism made available for European consumption. As Robertson (2013, p. 176) further noted, racialised and Orientalised figures contributed to framing chocolate consumption as a sign of social luxury. The choice of an Oriental woman is especially significant, because in the European imagination Asia was primarily associated with tea rather than chocolate. By importing Japanese motifs into chocolate advertising, the poster appropriates the symbolic capital of tea culture – refinement, ritual, serenity – and transfers it to chocolate, elevating its consumption as a cosmopolitan practice. In Marihira, therefore, exoticism does not derive from plantations or servitude but from the refinement of the act of consumption, transfigured into an intimate spectacle to which the European viewer is admitted as a cultural voyeur.

The textual component continues this anchoring function. At the bottom of the poster appears the brand name: Chocolate Amatller – Marca Luna. Even with the visual references to the moon and the woman’s act of consumption, the inscription remains necessary for the product to be clearly identified.

The poster’s enthymeme is based on the premise that those who consume chocolate are not only participating in a European domestic luxury but also in a cosmopolitan practice shared by elites around the world – in this instance, associated with the East. Exclusivity and exoticism become resources for legitimising a colonial product that, to maintain its prestige, had to be detached from its material origins and rewrapped in narratives of aspirational luxury (Robertson, 2013). Underlying this premise is the idea that chocolate consumption places European consumers on an equal footing with other elites. At the same time, the East is represented as an accessible space whose symbolic “femininity” legitimises the appropriation of its imagery, conferring sophistication and exclusivity on the act of consumption. In this way, the origins and labour of production are concealed, while only consumption is displayed as an elitist practice.

This article set out to explore how race was constructed, represented and commodified in early 20th-century Spanish advertising, asking how Amatller’s 1914 poster competition mobilised racial and Orientalist tropes in the promotion of chocolate. Framed within the concept of commodity racism (McClintock, 1995; King, 2009; Hund et al., 2013), the analysis has shown that these posters translated colonial hierarchies into visual codes of luxury, exoticism and bourgeois refinement. In Bateig, India and Marihira, racialisation and exoticisation operated as central semiotic resources: they obscured the realities of cocoa’s colonial production while legitimising its consumption as both domestic comfort and cosmopolitan luxury.

All three posters share a common semiotic logic: they situate the product in domestic settings that are carefully idealised and saturated with exoticism. Chocolate is presented only in its final form – chocolate pot in Bateig and India, porcelain cup in Marihira – hile its material origins in colonial exploitation and forced labour are deliberately concealed. This silencing was not incidental but part of a broader advertising strategy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: to detach commodities from their material bases and re-present them as desirable objects and markers of social distinction (Hackenesch, 2014).

This continuity reflects the symbolic status of chocolate. Until well into the 19th century, it remained a luxury commodity, strongly associated with exoticism and colonialism (Hackenesch, 2014). Its consumption was tied to elite status, not only because of price but also because of the symbolic weight of a product cultivated solely in tropical territories. With the expansion of the market to the bourgeoisie, advertising became decisive in maintaining this symbolic aura while broadening consumption. Amatller’s posters condense this tension: on the one hand, they democratise access by appealing to a new middle-class public; on the other, they preserve the rhetoric of luxury and exoticism through the representation of racialised figures.

The comparative reading also highlights important differences. In Bateig and India, black Moor male servants embody the role of intermediaries, mediating between chocolate and consumer. These figures represent what McClintock (1995, p. 221) defined as “commodity spectacles”: displayed not as historical agents but as subordinate frames for colonial products and bourgeois fantasy. Their portrayal is doubly subordinated: as black men placed in servile positions, they are symbolically feminised. By contrast, in Marihira, the central figure is a Japanese noblewoman consuming chocolate herself. Here exoticism is no longer tied to production or servitude but to the refinement of consumption. The poster reconfigures Orientalism into a cosmopolitan narrative: chocolate is represented not simply as a plantation product but as a global commodity that symbolically links the European bourgeois consumer to distant elites.

These contrasting strategies reveal how race, gender and class intersected in the semiotics of Amatller’s branding. In Bateig and India, the pleasure of white consumption is underpinned by the subordination of the black body, legitimised only in its role as servant and spectacle of bourgeois domesticity. In Marihira, the Japanese woman embodies a second-order exoticism: not the site of colonial labour but the model of elite, cosmopolitan consumption. The entire iconography of chocolate thus becomes feminised: black male servants symbolically feminised through service, and the Oriental woman depicted as passive and refined. In both cases, whiteness is affirmed as the locus of agency and privilege.

This broader logic corresponds to what Robertson (2013, p. 174) has described as “narratives of feminised luxury in a white world”: seemingly detached from colonial associations but in fact deeply embedded in them. As hooks (1992, p. 21) argued, the commodification of otherness is effective precisely because racial difference is offered as spice, a new delight that intensifies bourgeois consumption. In Amatller’s posters, racialised and Orientalised figures are not represented as subjects but reduced to semiotic functions: they embody exoticism, confer luxury and render consumption pleasurable, while their histories and labour are erased. Chocolate and blackness, as Hackenesch (2014, p. 35) reminded us, became intertwined within a regime of meaning traversed by sexualisation and racialisation – appearing simultaneously as indulgence and as symbol of vice and excess.

The continuities with wider European advertising are clear. As Robertson (2013, p. 182) has observed, such tropes were not isolated but part of a shared history of colonial exploitation of Africa and of the intertextuality of racist popular culture across Europe. They can be traced not only in chocolate brands such as Cadbury in Britain or Sarotti in Germany but also in other colonial commodities including tea, coffee, soap and tobacco, all of which relied on similar logics of racialisation and exoticism to legitimise bourgeois consumption. Chocolates Amatller’s imagery demonstrates that Spain, too, participated fully in this semiotic regime. What distinguishes it, however, is that – unlike Cadbury – Chocolates Amatller owned no plantations. Its branding therefore emphasised consumption rather than production, while still drawing on the racialised and Orientalist repertoire common to European commodity racism.

Taken together, Bateig, India and Marihira illustrate how Amatller’s 1914 competition harnessed race, gender and class as visual strategies for branding chocolate. These advertisements mobilise race not through explicit ideological claims but through aesthetic regimes (Thomas et al., 2023, pp. 622–624), that render colonial hierarchies pleasurable and familiar with bourgeois imaginaries. Whether through the black Moor servant as mediator or the Japanese lady as cosmopolitan consumer, these posters naturalised colonial hierarchies and translated them into bourgeois fantasies of domestic pleasure. They demonstrate how Spanish advertising not only echoed European trends but also contributed to the construction of consumer modernity: a symbolic order in which racialised otherness was commodified, feminised and consumed as luxury.

At the same time, this study has limitations. By focusing on finalist posters from a single competition, it primarily accesses the grammars of production rather than the grammars of reception: how contemporary consumers interpreted these images remains only indirectly accessible through press reviews and secondary literature. Nor does this analysis extend to other media, such as packaging, chromolithographs or press advertising, which also played a central role in shaping Chocolates Amatller’s brand. Nevertheless, the case examined here illustrates with particular clarity how the semiotics of advertising transformed colonial commodities into cultural objects of luxury. By situating Spanish advertising within this broader comparative frame, the article underscores the value of semiotic analysis for business history: it reveals how race, gender and class were not peripheral but constitutive of the visual languages through which modern consumer markets were built. In doing so, it also fills a notable gap: while commodity racism has been extensively studied in British, French and German advertising, the Spanish case has remained underexplored. Chocolates Amatller’s posters demonstrate that Spain, too, was deeply implicated in the visual economies of colonial consumption, albeit with distinctive inflections shaped by its historical position and the absence of direct plantation ownership.

The analysis developed in this article suggests that racialised representations in advertising should not be understood as historically bounded expressions of commodity racism, but as part of a longer ideological continuum through which unequal power relations are naturalised in everyday market objects. As Collins (2002) argued, the persistence of controlling images beyond the formal end of the social conditions that produced them demonstrates their role in maintaining intersecting systems of oppression. In this sense, the visual strategies identified in early chocolate advertising – particularly the association of racialised bodies with origin and subordinated forms of labour – should be read as historical precedents rather than isolated artefacts of the past.

This trajectory did not end in the early 20th century but continued in Spain through mass-market brands such as Cola Cao and Conguitos, and remains visible today in ethical, artisanal and premium chocolate marketing. Recent research shows how colonial visual repertoires persist within contemporary branding narratives: Lucumi-Mosquera’s (2024) analysis of craft chocolate marketing demonstrates how black Latina women are aestheticised as naturalised producers, positioned as sources of authenticity rather than as consumers, thereby reproducing long-standing racial hierarchies under the guise of ethical branding. These continuities underscore the ethical implications of commercial imagery as a site where racialised social roles are normalised and reproduced over time, contributing to the moral economy of capitalism across past and present contexts.

Finally, this historical analysis contributes to understanding contemporary dynamics of race and racism in chocolate marketing by showing how racialised figures have been unevenly positioned within regimes of consumption and service. In the Chocolates Amatller posters analysed here, racialised subjects appear primarily as servants mediating access to the commodity, while the notable exception of the Japanese noblewoman is depicted as a refined consumer, revealing a differentiated visual grammar of race and class. As Cidell and Alberts (2006) observe in relation to contemporary craft chocolate, value continues to be constructed through narratives of origin and embodied difference; and as Gonzalez (2020) and Collins (2002) remind us, such representational logics adapt rather than disappear. In line with Ciarlo’s (2011) argument, these images mobilise sedimented power relations that continue to shape how goods and people are perceived, suggesting that contemporary ethical or artisanal marketing may rearticulate older racial hierarchies rather than fully depart from them.