About Cocoa

Cocoa Production

Cocoa, which is the main ingredient in chocolate, comes from cocoa beans. These beans grow in a cocoa pod on a cocoa tree (biological name Theobroma Cacao L, so called by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus back in the 17th century. Theobroma means “Food of the Gods”).

In order to keep up with consumer demand, and avoid decline of this raw material, The Cocoa Plan initiative is essential in encouraging and helping farmers to improve the quality and quantity of their cocoa harvests.

Cocoa pods take about six months to develop, starting from small delicate flowers. There are hundreds on a single tree. Once they are pollinated, they develop into ‘cherelles’, tiny pods just a few millimetres long that grow into ripe cocoa pods.

Each cocoa pod contains between 20 and 50 beans, is about 15cm to 25cm long and 7cm to 10cm wide. On average, a single pod weighs about 500 grams. As a rough guide, a mature tree grows to about eight metres high, but to make harvesting easier, is generally pruned to about six metres. In a single year it can yield up to 2,500 beans. That’s enough to make anything between, say, twenty-five and fifty 100 gram bars of chocolate, depending on their amount of cocoa content.