Before cocoa became chocolate, its beans bought rabbit dinners in Mesoamerica
In Mesoamerica before the Spanish arrived, you could pay for a tamale or a rabbit dinner with cocoa beans, and a turkey hen cost a larger pile. The same seeds, fermented under banana leaves and dried in the sun, now underpin a trade of millions of tonnes a year, most of it grown in West Africa.
The cacao tree comes from the Amazon rainforest, and people in what is now southeast Ecuador were cultivating it at least 5,300 years ago. Interest may first have centred on the fruit, not the seed: the sweet, lemonade-flavoured pulp was brewed into a drink of around five per cent alcohol. The Maya and Olmec later used cacao in ritual, and a Spanish soldier with Cortés described Moctezuma drinking frothy spiced chocolate from a golden cup, reportedly dozens of servings a day. Linnaeus later named the tree Theobroma, food of the gods.
Pods grow straight from the trunk and thick branches, which puts most within reach from the ground. They ripen unevenly, so pickers go round several times a week through a long season, and a skilled worker can cut some 650 pods in a day. Each pod weighs roughly 400 grams and holds 30 to 50 seeds, yet only about a tenth of its weight ends up as dried beans. Around 400 of them go into a pound of chocolate.
Fermentation, called sweating, decides quality. As the pulp liquefies and drains away, the seeds turn from pale violet to brown and lose their harsh bitterness; stop too early and they taste like raw potato and grow mildew. Small growers prefer sun drying because smoke and oil fumes from artificial dryers can taint the flavour, though rushing the job leaves beans too acidic.
Production reached 5.8 million tonnes in 2024, with Ivory Coast alone supplying 38 per cent, ahead of Ghana and Indonesia. Cacao reached Ghana through a local man, Tetteh Quarshie. The old trio of Criollo, Forastero and Trinitario still appears on wrappers, although genetic work suggests two of those labels reflect history and geography more than botany. Clearing forest for new plantations remains a serious worry across West Africa.
Source: Cocoa bean
