Inside each pod are 30 to 50 cocoa seeds, covered in sticky, sweet white pulp. That means one tree can make enough cocoa beans to make 40-60 chocolate bars a year.
Farmers plant the trees in straight lines so they can walk down a row. But where I live is hilly, so sometimes the rows are a little crooked. The entire process is done by hand, there are no machines to help!
The process to harvest cocoa and then turn it into chocolate takes almost two months! First, farmers pick the cocoa pods off the trees. Then they cut them open, and this is where you can eat the pulp! After, they spread all the seeds out with the pulp to let the sun cook, or ferment, the pulp. Once they are baked in the sun for a week, the pulp falls off the seed. Then, farmers spread the seeds out on long tables where they dry in the sunlight for a week and a half. When this happens, the entire village smells like chocolate!
After the seeds are dried, they are put in bags and shipped to other countries that turn them into the sweet chocolate bars and brownies that we love.
Ghana grows nearly 25% of all cocoa in the world. That means every time you eat a brownie, chocolate chip cookie, or even a Kit-Kat, there is a one in four chance the chocolate inside it was grown in Ghana.
Cocoa trees don’t just grow anywhere. They need warm, rainy places near the equator with rich soil, plenty of sun and steady rain to thrive. Without this special environment, chocolate as we know it wouldn’t exist. So every bite of chocolate is connected to the land, the climate and the farmers who care for the trees.
