From bean to bar
Did you know that chocolate is made from cocoa beans? Read on to find out more about how the beans turn into your favourite chocolate bar.
Cocoa trees need tropical conditions to grow. near the equator - Ghana is where most of our cocoa comes from
In the wild, cocoa trees can grow to be 15m high but on farms and plantations they grow to around 5 or 8 metres. They grow healthiest when they are surrounded by other trees like coconut trees or banana trees.
Cocoa trees grow fruit called pods that are the same size and shape as rugby balls. Each tree produces around 30 pods like this.
Harvest:
After about five or six months the pods are ripe enough to harvest. Harvesting looks quite dangerous because big machetes are used to cut the pods from the tree. Because the pods are so delicate, harvesting has to be done by hand.
Each individual pod is opened by hand using a machete.
A ripe cocoa pod contains about 30 to 40 cocoa beans. The beans are inside a white juicy, sweet and sticky mixture called pulp.
The cocoa beans and the sticky sweet pulp are wrapped in banana leaves and left outside to ferment. This is how the beans get their chocolatey flavour and colour.
When fermentation is finished, the cocoa beans are laid out in the sun for a week or two to dry. Each bean is carefully checked by hand and the bad beans are separated from the good ones.
The beans are then exported all over the world.
The cocoa beans are roasted in the chocolate factory. This produces two important products that you need to make chocolate: cocoa butter and cocoa.
