Cocoa. Reimagined.
From the rainforest understorey to the bar in your hand — the remarkable life of Theobroma cacao.
01 Origin
First, the food of the gods.
In 1753 Linnaeus named it Theobroma cacao — “food of the gods”. Its story is far older: residues found in the upper Amazon of Ecuador show people were using cacao more than 5,300 years ago.
01 Origin
Ten families. One tree.
Geneticists sorting hundreds of wild and cultivated trees found ten distinct groups, each shaped by its own river valley. Flavour, vigour and resilience all trace back to this family tree.
01 Origin
It all starts with one bean.
Cacao seeds cannot be dried and stored like grain — they must be sown fresh. Soon a root pushes down into the soil and the first pair of leaves unfolds toward the light.
02 Canopy
It thrives in the shade.
Cacao is an understorey tree. It grows best beneath taller rainforest giants, in warm, humid air, reaching four to eight metres when cultivated — and branching in a distinctive fan-shaped whorl.
02 Canopy
Flowers bloom on the trunk.
Unlike most trees, cacao flowers straight from its trunk and older branches. Thousands of tiny blossoms open each year, pollinated mostly by midges barely bigger than a pinhead. Only a small fraction become pods.
02 Canopy
The cocoa belt.
Almost all of the world’s cacao grows within twenty degrees of the equator. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana together supply more than half of it, followed by Ecuador, Cameroon, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil.
03 Harvest
Harvested by hand.
Pods ripen five to six months after pollination. Each is cut from the tree by hand, then split open to reveal twenty to sixty beans wrapped in sweet, white pulp.
03 Harvest
Ferment. Dry. Transform.
Heaped under banana leaves, the beans ferment for up to a week as the pulp drains away and flavour begins to form. Then they dry in the sun, turning from pale violet to deep, chocolate brown.
03 Harvest
400 beans. One pound of chocolate.
Roughly four hundred cocoa beans go into a single pound of chocolate. Every bar carries the work of a forest, a farmer, and more than five thousand years of history.