Where Does Chocolate Come From? A Cacao Pod, Explained

The first time you show a child a cacao pod, there is a good chance they will not believe you when you tell them there is chocolate inside.

Fair enough.

A cacao pod looks nothing like a chocolate bar. It can be yellow, orange, red, green, or somewhere in between, with a thick, ridged shell. Cut one open and you find rows of seeds covered in soft white pulp.

Those seeds are cacao beans.

So when my kids ask me where does chocolate come from, this is where I like to start. Not with a wrapper. Not even with a brown cacao bean.

With a colorful fruit growing on a tree.

Choco asks: Wait. Chocolate is a fruit?

Nolla: We're going to need to talk about this.

What is a cacao pod?

A cacao pod is the fruit of the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao. The trees grow in warm, humid regions relatively close to the equator.

And cacao trees are wonderfully strange.

The pods can grow directly from the trunk and larger branches. If you are used to seeing apples hanging from smaller branches, a cacao tree can look as though someone stuck colorful football-shaped fruit straight onto its trunk.

Inside each pod are cacao beans surrounded by a white pulp. Those beans are the beginning of chocolate, but eating one straight from the pod would be a very different experience from biting into a chocolate bar.

There is still a lot of work ahead.

One of my favorite cacao tree facts is that the scientific name Theobroma comes from Greek words often translated as “food of the gods.”

That is quite a name to live up to.

Where does chocolate come from before it reaches the factory?

Once cacao pods are ripe, they are harvested and opened so the beans and surrounding pulp can be removed.

Then something important happens: fermentation.

The beans are fermented with the pulp around them, typically over several days. Fermentation helps create the chemical changes that eventually contribute to the chocolate flavors we recognize later. After fermentation, the beans are dried.

At this stage, you still do not have anything resembling the creamy chocolate bar in your kitchen cupboard.

You have dried cacao beans.

Those beans are then ready for the next part of the process. For Chocoraph, the cacao we use comes from Ecuador. You can read more about what goes into our bar on our [Ingredients page].

And this is the point where I think the answer to where does chocolate come from becomes much more interesting than “cacao beans.”

There is a whole transformation between the tree and the bar.

How is chocolate made for kids to understand?

If I were explaining the next part to a five-year-old, I would put it this way.

First, you have a cacao pod.

Inside are beans.

The beans are fermented and dried. Later, the chocolate maker roasts them. The shells are removed, leaving pieces called cacao nibs.

Then those nibs get ground.

And ground.

And ground some more.

As cacao nibs are ground, they turn into a thick paste called cacao mass. This happens partly because cacao beans naturally contain cocoa butter, which is their fat.

From there, other ingredients can be added depending on the kind of chocolate being made. The chocolate is refined to make it smoother, and other steps help develop its flavor and texture. Then it is tempered and molded into bars.

That last part took me a while to get right when I started making chocolate in my own kitchen. Some of my early batches were soft and dull, and I couldn't understand why. Learning about tempering changed the way I understood chocolate completely.

A cacao bean becoming a glossy chocolate bar suddenly seemed much less simple.

Choco asks: So nobody finds chocolate bars growing on trees?

Nolla: Unfortunately, no.

Choco: I need a minute.

Does chocolate really grow on trees?

Yes and no.

Cacao grows on trees. Chocolate does not.

The distinction is worth making, especially with children, because a finished chocolate bar is the result of many steps. The cacao pod gives us the beans, but those beans have to be fermented, dried, roasted, processed, combined with other ingredients depending on the recipe, and turned into chocolate.

For me, learning where chocolate comes from made chocolate more interesting, not less.

Before I started Chocoraph, I was mostly interested in what was written on the back of a chocolate wrapper. Then I started making chocolate myself and kept working backward. What was cacao mass? What was cocoa butter? What did fermentation actually do? Why did my chocolate refuse to snap?

One question kept producing another.

My children, as it turns out, are very good at this too.

If you want to know how my kitchen experiments eventually became Chocoraph, you can read the longer version on our [Our Story page].

For now, the next time your child unwraps a chocolate bar, tell them where it started.

Inside a big, colorful pod growing from a cacao tree.

That usually earns a few more questions.

FAQs

Where does chocolate come from?

Chocolate begins with cacao beans, which are the seeds found inside cacao pods. Cacao pods grow on Theobroma cacao trees in warm, humid regions near the equator. The beans are fermented, dried, roasted, and processed before becoming chocolate.

What is a cacao pod?

A cacao pod is the fruit of the cacao tree. It has a thick, ridged outer shell and contains cacao beans surrounded by soft white pulp. Those cacao beans are the raw material used to make chocolate.

How do cacao beans become chocolate?

Cacao beans are fermented and dried after harvesting. Chocolate makers then roast the beans, remove their shells, grind the cacao nibs, and process the cacao into chocolate. Other ingredients and additional steps depend on the type and recipe of chocolate being made.