Chocolate is one of the world's most popular foods, yet few people who enjoy it…

Chocolate is one of the world's most popular foods, yet few people who enjoy it have ever seen the plant it comes from. The cacao tree is a small tree that grows only in hot, humid regions within about twenty degrees of the equator. Its fruit are large pods, each containing thirty to fifty seeds, known as cocoa beans, surrounded by a sweet white pulp.

Freshly harvested beans taste bitter and nothing like chocolate. The famous flavour develops through a series of steps. First, the beans and pulp are piled together, usually covered with banana leaves, and left to ferment for several days. During fermentation, the pulp breaks down and chemical changes inside the beans begin to create the compounds that will later give chocolate its taste. The beans are then dried in the sun, packed into sacks and shipped to factories, often on the other side of the world.

At the factory, the beans are roasted, which deepens the flavour, and their shells are removed. The remaining pieces are ground into a thick paste called cocoa mass. This paste can be pressed to separate it into cocoa butter, a pale fat, and cocoa powder. To make chocolate, manufacturers combine cocoa mass with sugar, extra cocoa butter and, for milk chocolate, milk powder, and then mix and heat the mixture for hours until it becomes smooth.

For most of its history, chocolate was a drink rather than a food. The ancient peoples of Central America, including the Maya and the Aztecs, drank a bitter cocoa drink, often flavoured with chilli. Spanish explorers brought cocoa to Europe in the sixteenth century, where it became a fashionable drink among the wealthy, usually sweetened with sugar. The first modern chocolate bar was produced in England in 1847, and milk chocolate was developed in Switzerland in the 1870s.

Today, most of the world's cocoa is no longer grown in Central America but in West Africa. Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana together produce around sixty percent of the global supply, mainly on small family farms. Many of these farmers earn very little, and the industry has faced serious criticism over poverty and child labour. Chocolate companies and governments have promised to improve conditions, but progress has been slow, and many campaigners argue that the price paid to farmers must rise if real change is to happen.