How is chocolate made?
Pod to Pop
How is chocolate made?
Chocolate doesn't grow on a shelf, wrapped in foil and waiting. It begins life as something you'd never recognize: a knobbly, football-shaped pod hanging straight off a tree trunk in a hot, sticky jungle. Let's follow it.
That tree is the cacao tree, and it likes places near the equator where it's warm and rainy all year. Crack open a ripe pod and you don't find chocolate at all. You find a clump of pale, slippery seeds wrapped in sweet white goo. Those seeds are the secret. We call them cacao beans.
