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The drying process usually takes about a week and results in seeds that are about half of their original weight.
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Farmers simply spread the fermented seeds on trays and leave them in the sun to dry. This process may take five or eight days.Īfter fermentation, the cocoa seeds must be dried before they can be scooped into sacks and shipped to chocolate manufacturers. During fermentation is when the beans turn brown. Workers come along periodically and stir them up so that all of the beans come out equally fermented. If the climate is right, they may be simply heated by the sun. They are either placed in large, shallow, heated trays or covered with large banana leaves. Now the beans undergo the fermentation processing. Fresh cocoa beans are not brown at all, they do not taste at all like the sweet chocolate they will eventually produce.
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Pods can contain upwards of 50 cocoa beans each. Here they are split open and the cocoa beans are removed. Machines could damage the tree or the clusters of flowers and pods that grow from the trunk, so workers must be harvest the pods by hand, using short, hooked blades mounted on long poles to reach the highest fruit.Īfter the cocoa pods are collected into baskets ,the pods are taken to a processing house. When the pods are ripe, harvesters travel through the cocoa orchards with machetes and hack the pods gently off of the trees.Ĭlick here for a video clip of Cocoa processing "1:05 minutes" (Requires RealPlayer) The pods start out green and turn orange when they're ripe. The pods are about the size of a football. Step #1: Plucking and opening the PodsĬocoa beans grow in pods that sprout off of the trunk and branches of cocoa trees. These cocoa beans will then be ready to be shipped to the manufacturer for mass production. The seed pods of coca will first be collected the beans will be selected and placed in piles. Cocoa needs to be harvested manually in the forest. Cocoa comes from tropical evergreen Cocoa trees, such as Theobroma Cocoa, which grow in the wet lowland tropics of Central and South America, West Africa and Southeast Asia (within 20 C of the equator) (Walter,1981). Source: International Cocoa organization, April 1998 Harvesting Cocoa & Cocoa processingĬhocolate production starts with harvesting coca in a forest. ICCO forecasts of production of cocoa beans for the 1997/98 cocoa year