How are cacao pods harvested?

Once mature, each cacao tree, planted in the shade of a larger tree, will produce 5 pounds of chocolate per year -- or about 15 to 30 pods since, once dried, the beans from an average pod weigh less than 2 ounces, and approximately 400 are required to make 1 pound of chocolate. Anywhere from 20 to 50 cream-colored beans are scooped from a typical pod, and the husk and inner membrane discarded. Exposure to the air quickly changes the color of the beans from cream to lavender or purple, but they are far from what we would recognize as chocolate and lack its characteristic fragrance.

At this point, the cocoa beans are put into boxes or thrown into heaps and covered with burlap. The layer of pulp that surrounds each bean starts to heat up and ferment - a simple "yeasting" process that converts the sugars in the beans to acids, primarily lactic and acetic acid. Fermentation, which takes from three to nine days and generates temperatures as high as 125 degrees F.

, kills the germ of the bean, removes the beans' bitter taste, and activates enzymes that form the precursors of the compounds that will produce chocolate's luscious flavor when the beans are roasted. The result is a bean ready for drying. During drying, the beans lose more than half their weight and nearly all their moisture, reaching a moisture content of no more than 7 percent.

Once dried, the beans are loaded into 130-to-200-pound sacks and sent to shipping centers, where they are inspected by buyers. To sample the quality of a crop, buyers cut open a number of beans to check that they are uniformly dark brown rather than purple at the center, which indicates incomplete fermentation. If the beans meet with approval, the grower is paid at the current market price, which depends not only on the abundance of the worldwide crop and the quality of farmers' crops in a number of countries, but on a number of economic conditions around the world.

The chocolate industry has set up cocoa exchanges, similar to stock exchanges, in principal cities such as New York, London, Hamburg, and Amsterdam, where the prices are set.

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