Harvesting Cocoa & Cocoa processing
Chocolate production starts with harvesting coca in a 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) . Cocoa needs to be harvested manually in the forest. The seed pods of coca will first be collected; the beans will be selected and placed in piles. These cocoa beans will then be ready to be shipped to the manufacturer for mass production.
Step #1: Plucking and opening the Pods
Cocoa beans grow in pods that sprout off of the trunk and branches of cocoa trees. The pods are about the size of a football. The pods start out green and turn orange when they're ripe. When the pods are ripe, harvesters travel through the cocoa orchards with machetes and hack the pods gently off of the trees.