Line of cocoa: Is snorting chocolate safe?

“We did some tests sniffing pure chocolate, but it was not strong enough,” Persoone said. “Then, we mixed the chocolate with chili pepper — that hurt a lot.”

The inventors finally settled on a mixture of dry mint, ginger and chocolate, and went to a hardware store for the materials to build their own chocolate-snorting machine.

Before long, Persoone said, “everybody wanted to have that machine.” In the 10 years since that time, his company has sold more than 25,000 of the devices to people all over the world, he said.