The origin of chocolate, telling its story, should start at the beginning. In my opinion, we start with the tree and the fruit it gives us. How it’s made: the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao. Known by many as the Food of the gods, if you translate it literally. If you ask me a fair enough name, once you have tasted the good stuff. Not chocolate, but the fresh fruit. I recall the first time I stood next to my first cacao tree, on a small farm near Sarapiquí, in Costa Rica, back in 2017. A trip I still think about fondly. It looks nothing like what you would expect from a chocolate tree, and that is exactly the point.

The tree itself comes from South America, from the Amazon and Rio Negro river basins. Its natural home is the deep rainforest, tucked away beneath a lush green canopy, sheltered from direct sun by the taller trees above it. Left alone, a wild cacao tree can reach 12 to 15 metres. On a farm, growers usually prune it back to around 8 metres. It makes harvesting a little less of a challenge.

Where does it grow?
Cacao only grows in the cacao belt, an area within about 20 degrees north and south of the equator. Think West Africa, large parts of Latin America, and pockets of Southeast Asia. Outside that narrow band, the current climate simply will not allow it to thrive. You can find the Theobroma cacao tree around the world in large greenhouses and botanical collections, but too cold, too dry, not humid enough, and the tree gives up.

Growing in sun and shade
Traditionally, cacao is grown the way it has grows in the wild, in the shade of taller companion trees. n plantations it’s often a secondary crop next to bananas and citrus tree. They can act as a living umbrella, sheltering the cacao tree. The growth is slower, and the yield from the tree is lower, but the tree stays healthier for a longer time.

Full sun plantations do the opposite. They give the trees more light, leading to faster growth, and a bigger harvest. But this also means the trees are more prone to disease, and the soil tires out faster, as the trees need more nutrients to support their faster growth. CCN-51, the famously high-yielding hybrid I sometimes mention, is mostly grown this way. You can find huge plantations of this variety across Ecuador.

From sprout to blooming tree
A cacao seed germinates within days of being planted, which always surprises people. Yes, it’s that fast. But from there on out, though, patience is the only option. The first flowers, and the first fruit, do not appear on the tree until the tree is three to four years old. Time is used to grow and form a firm trunk. The full productivity of a tree is not reached until the tree is ten years old. After that, a healthy, happy tree keeps producing for roughly 25 years, though this can sometimes be considerably longer.

What is a cacao pod supposed to look like?
This is where variety starts to matter. In very big groups: Criollo pods are elongated, slightly pointed, with a soft, uneven, ridged skin, usually red or green before they ripen. Forastero pods are rounder and smoother, with a tougher shell. Amelonado, a Forastero type, is exactly what it sounds like: round and melon shaped. Trinitario sits somewhere in between, being a natural cross of the two. But honestly, there is so much diversity that those rules don’t always apply. There are so many differences, and yet they all look the same, in some way.

Let’s talk about the strange flowers.
These genuinely surprised me, as I recall walking in Costa Rica, scanning the treetops. But cacao flowers do not grow at the tips of branches like most fruit trees. They grow straight out of the trunk and the older, thicker branches. They cover the trunk spce in small clusters. Botanists call this habit cauliflory. The flowers themselves are tiny, barely a centimetre or two across. Pale white to pink in colour and almost entirely without scent.

No scent, and no bees. Midges fertilise the flowers. Tiny, biting midges are the main pollinators of cacao, and they are famously unreliable at their important job. A flower stays open and receptive for a day or two at the most. Unpollinated, it dies within about 36 hours. Depending on which study you read, somewhere between 3 in 1,000 and one in five flowers ever gets pollinated. The numbers vary that wildly. However you count it, a tree can produce thousands of flowers a year, while gifting only a small handful of pods.

From flower to ripe pod.
Once a flower is pollinated, it takes around six months to grow into a full, ripe, harvestable pod. Cacao trees flower more or less continuously, rather than all at once. So a single tree can be covered in pods at every stage, all at the same time. Tiny green new pods can sit right next to others that are nearly ready for harvest.

As I learned, a tree carries somewhere between 20 up to 40 pods at a time. Each pod holds somewhere between 32 to 50 seeds. The shape of the pod alone can already tell an experienced farmer which variety they are looking at. Before they have even cut one open. As the pods ripen, they start to change colour, turning red, yellow, orange or purplish depending on the variety. A ripe pod can be left hanging for two or three weeks without spoiling. That buys a farmer some breathing room. No need to rush the decision.

And that moment, cutting a pod open for the first time, is where this story continues. Just not today.