Product Code Database
The cocoa bean, also known as cocoa () or cacao (), is the dried and fully Fermentation seed of Theobroma cacao, the cacao tree, from which cocoa solids (a mixture of nonfat substances) and cocoa butter (the fat) can be extracted. Cacao trees are native to the Amazon rainforest. They are the basis of chocolate and Mesoamerican foods including tejate, an indigenous Mexico drink.
The cacao tree was first domesticated at least 5,300 years ago by the Mayo-Chinchipe culture in South America before it was introduced in Mesoamerica. Cacao was consumed by pre-Hispanic cultures in spiritual ceremonies, and its beans were a common currency in Mesoamerica. The cacao tree grows in a limited geographical zone; today, West Africa produces nearly 81% of the world's crop. The three main varieties of cocoa plants are Forastero tree, Criollo, and Trinitario, with Forastero being the most widely used.
In 2024, global cocoa bean production reached 5.8 million tonnes, with Ivory Coast leading at 38% of the total, followed by Ghana and Indonesia. Cocoa beans, cocoa butter, and cocoa powder are traded on futures markets, with London focusing on West African cocoa and New York on Southeast Asian cocoa. Various international and national initiatives aim to support sustainable cocoa production, including the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa (SWISSCO), the German Initiative on Sustainable Cocoa (GISCO), and Belgium's Beyond Chocolate. At least 29% of global cocoa production was compliant with voluntary sustainability standards in 2016. Deforestation due to cocoa production remains a concern, especially in West Africa. Sustainable agricultural practices, such as agroforestry, can support cocoa production while conserving biodiversity. Cocoa contributes significantly to economies such as Nigeria's, and demand for cocoa products has grown at over 3% annually since 2008.
Cocoa contains like flavanols, , and other , and flavanol-rich chocolate and cocoa products may have a small blood pressure lowering effect. The beans also contain theobromine and a small amount of caffeine. The tree takes five years to grow and has a typical lifespan of 100 years.
The term cocoa beans originated in the 19th century; during the 18th century they were called chocolate nuts, cocoa nuts or just cocoa.
More than 3,000 years ago, it was consumed by pre-Hispanic cultures along the Yucatán, including the Maya, and as far back as Olmeca civilization in spiritual ceremonies. It also grows in the foothills of the Andes in the Amazon River region and the Orinoco basins of South America, such as in Colombia and Venezuela. Wild cacao still grows there. Its range may have been larger in the past; evidence of its wild range may be obscured by cultivation of the tree in these areas since long before the Spanish arrived.
As of 2018, evidence suggests that cacao was first domesticated in equatorial South America, before being domesticated in Central America roughly 1,500 years later. Artifacts found at Santa-Ana-La Florida, in Ecuador, indicate that the Mayo-Chinchipe people were cultivating cacao as long as 5,300 years ago. Chemical analysis of residue extracted from pottery excavated at an archaeological site at Puerto Escondido, in Honduras, indicates that cocoa products were first consumed there sometime between 1500 and 1400 BC. Evidence also indicates that, long before the flavor of the cacao seed (or bean) became popular, the sweet pulp of the chocolate fruit, used in making a fermented (5.34% alcohol) beverage, first drew attention to the plant in the Americas.
The cocoa bean was a common currency throughout Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest.The bean was utilized in pre-modern Latin America to purchase small items such as tamales and rabbit dinners. A greater quantity of cocoa beans was used to purchase turkey hens and other large items.
Cacao trees grow in a limited geographical zone, of about 20° to the north and south of the Equator. More than 70% of the world's cacao crop is grown in Africa, with Ivory Coast and Ghana producing approximately 58% of global production. The cacao plant was first given its botanical name by Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus in his original classification of the plant kingdom, where he called it Theobroma ("food of the gods") cacao.
Cocoa was an important commodity in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. A Spanish soldier who was on Hernan Cortés' side during the conquest of the Aztec Empire tells that when Moctezuma II, emperor of the , dined, he took no other beverage than chocolate, served in a goblet. Flavored with vanilla or other , his chocolate was whipped into a froth that dissolved in the mouth. No fewer than 60 portions each day reportedly may have been consumed by Moctezuma II, and 2,000 more by the Nobility of his court.Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (2005) 1632. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez (Introduction). Mexico: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, S.A. .
Chocolate was introduced to Europe by the Spaniards, and became a popular beverage by the mid-17th century. Venezuela became the largest producer of cocoa beans in the world. Spaniards also introduced the cacao tree into the West Indies and the Philippines. It was also introduced into the rest of Asia, South Asia and into West Africa by Europeans. In the Gold Coast, modern Ghana, cacao was introduced by a Ghanaian, Tetteh Quarshie.
During harvest, the pods are opened, the seeds are kept, and the empty pods are discarded and the pulp made into juice. The seeds are placed where they can ferment. Due to heat buildup in the fermentation process, cacao beans lose most of the purplish hue and become mostly brown in color, with an adhered skin which includes the dried remains of the fruity pulp. This skin is released easily by winnowing after roasting. White seeds are found in some rare varieties, usually mixed with purples, and are considered of higher value.
Immature cocoa pods have a variety of colours, but most often are green, red, or purple, and as they mature, their colour tends towards yellow or orange, particularly in the creases. Unlike most fruiting trees, the cacao pod grows directly from the trunk or large branch of a tree rather than from the end of a branch, similar to jackfruit. This makes harvesting by hand easier as most of the pods will not be up in the higher branches. The pods on a tree do not ripen together; harvesting needs to be done periodically through the year. Harvesting occurs between three and four times weekly during the harvest season. The ripe and near-ripe pods, as judged by their colour, are harvested from the trunk and branches of the cacao tree with a curved knife on a long pole. Care must be used when cutting the stem of the pod to avoid damaging the junction of the stem with the tree, as this is where future flowers and pods will emerge. One person can harvest an estimated 650 pods per day.
A typical pod contains 30 to 40 beans and about 400 dried beans are required to make of chocolate. Cocoa pods weigh an average of and each one yields dried beans; this yield is 9–10% of the total weight in the pod. One person can separate the beans from about 2000 pods per day.
The wet beans are then transported to a facility so they can be fermented and dried. The farmer packs them into boxes or heaps them into piles, then covers them with mats or banana leaves for three to seven days. Finally, the beans are trodden and shuffled about (often using bare human feet) and sometimes, during this process, red clay mixed with water is sprinkled over the beans to obtain a finer color, polish, and protection against molds during shipment to factories in other countries. Drying in the sun is a common means of drying the beans, particularly among smaller cocoa farmers, as no extraneous flavors such as smoke or oil are introduced which might otherwise taint the flavor as is common in many artificial means of drying. However, large-scale chocolate producers often use artificial means because the processes are more controllable and are not dependent on the weather as well as being faster. Drying the beans too fast, however, can lead to incomplete chemical and physical processes during the drying process which remove or destroy acidic compounds and that can leave the beans overly acidic, decreasing their quality.
The beans should be dry for shipment, which is usually by sea. Traditionally exported in jute bags, over the last decade, beans are increasingly shipped in "mega-bulk" parcels of several thousand tonnes at a time on ships, or standardized to per bag and 200 () or 240 () bags per container. Shipping in bulk significantly reduces handling costs. Shipment in bags, either in a ship's hold or in containers, is still common.
Throughout Mesoamerica where they are native, cocoa beans are used for a variety of foods. The harvested and fermented beans may be ground to order at tiendas de chocolate, or chocolate mills. At these mills, the cocoa can be mixed with a variety of ingredients such as cinnamon, , almonds, vanilla, and other spices to create drinking chocolate. The ground cocoa is also an important ingredient in tejate.
The cocoa industry was accused of profiting from child slavery and trafficking. The Harkin–Engel Protocol is an effort to end these practices. In 2001, it was signed and witnessed by the heads of eight major chocolate companies, US senators Tom Harkin and Herb Kohl, US Representative Eliot Engel, the ambassador of the Ivory Coast, the director of the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor, and others. It has, however, been criticized by some groups including the International Labor Rights Forum as an industry initiative which falls short, as the goal to eliminate the "worst forms of child labor" from cocoa production by 2005 was not reached. The deadline was extended multiple times and the goal changed to a 70% child labor reduction.
Child labour was growing in some West African countries in 2008–09 when it was estimated that 819,921 children worked on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast alone; by 2013–14, the number went up to 1,303,009. During the same period in Ghana, the estimated number of children working on cocoa farms was 957,398 children.
The 2010 documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate revealed that children smuggled from Mali to the Ivory Coast were forced to earn income for their parents, while others were sold as slaves for €230.
In 2010, the US Department of Labor formed the Child Labor Cocoa Coordinating Group as a public-private partnership with the governments of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire to address child labor practices in the cocoa industry.
As of 2017, approximately 2.1 million children in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire were involved in harvesting cocoa, carrying heavy loads, clearing forests, and being exposed to pesticides. According to Sona Ebai, the former secretary general of the Alliance of Cocoa Producing Countries: "I think child labor cannot be just the responsibility of industry to solve. I think it's the proverbial all-hands-on-deck: government, civil society, the private sector. And there, you really need leadership." As Reported in 2018, a three-year Pilot experiment, conducted by Nestlé with 26,000 farmers mostly located in Côte d'Ivoire, observed a 51% decrease in the number of children doing hazardous jobs in cocoa farming.
| + 2022, millions of tonnes |
| 2.23 |
| 1.10 |
| 0.68 |
| 0.34 |
| 0.30 |
| 0.28 |
| 0.27 |
| 5.2 |
In 2022, world production of cocoa beans was 5.87 million , led by Ivory Coast with 38% of the total, while secondary producers were Ghana and Indonesia (table).
Cocoa beans, cocoa butter and cocoa powder are traded on futures markets. The London market is based on West African cocoa and New York on cocoa predominantly from Southeast Asia. Cocoa is the world's smallest soft commodity market. The futures price of cocoa butter and cocoa powder is determined by multiplying the bean price by a ratio. The combined butter and powder ratio has tended to be around 3.5. If the combined ratio falls below 3.2 or so, production ceases to be economically viable and some factories cease extraction of butter and powder and trade exclusively in Chocolate liquor.
Cocoa futures traded on the ICE Futures US Softs exchange, are valued at 10 Tonnes per contract with a tick size of 1 and tick value of US$10.
| +Contract Specification !Cocoa (CCA) ! | |
| Exchange: | NYI |
| Sector: | Soft |
| Tick Size: | 1 |
| Tick Value: | 10 USD |
| BPV: | 10 |
| Denomination: | USD |
| Decimal Place: | 0 |
Fair trade cocoa producer groups are established in Belize, Bolivia, Cameroon, the Congo, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Ghana, Haiti, India, Ivory Coast, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Sierra Leone, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
In 2018, the Beyond Chocolate partnership was created between multiple stakeholders in the global cocoa industry to decrease deforestation and provide a living income for cocoa farmers. The many international companies are currently participating in this agreement and the following voluntary certification programs are also partners in the Beyond Chocolate initiative: Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade, ISEAL, BioForum Vlaanderen.
Many major chocolate production companies around the world have started to prioritize buying fair trade cocoa by investing in fair trade cocoa production, improving fair trade cocoa supply chains and setting purchasing goals to increase the proportion of fair trade chocolate available in the global market. "Fairtrade Cadbury Dairy Milk Goes Global as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand take Fairtrade Further Into Mainstream". Cadbury PLC 2010. Retrieved 1 July 2010.
The Rainforest Alliance lists the following goals as part of their certification program:
The UTZ Certified-program (now part of Rainforest Alliance) included counteracting against child labor and exploitation of cocoa workers, requiring a code of conduct in relation to social and environmentally friendly factors, and improvement of farming methods to increase profits and salaries of farmers and distributors.
Sustainable agricultural practices such as utilizing to prepare the soil before planting and intercropping cocoa seedlings with companion plants can support cocoa production and benefit the farm ecosystem. Prior to planting cocoa, legume can improve the soil nutrients and structure, which are important in areas where cocoa is produced due to high heat and rainfall which can diminish soil quality. cooking banana are often intercropped with cocoa to provide shade to young seedlings and improve drought resilience of the soil. If the soil lacks essential nutrients, compost or animal manure can improve soil fertility and help with water retention.Dohmen, M. M., Noponen, M., Enomoto, R., Mensah, C., & Muilerman, S. (2018). Climate-Smart Agriculture in Cocoa A Training Manual for Field Officers (pp. 1–111, Rep.). Washington, DC: World Cocoa Foundation
The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides by cocoa farmers is limited. When cocoa bean prices are high, farmers may invest in their crops, leading to higher yields which, in turn tends to result in lower market prices and a renewed period of lower investment.
While governments and have made efforts to help cocoa farmers in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire sustainably improve crop yields, many of the educational and financial resources provided are more readily available to male farmers versus female farmers. Access to credit is important for cocoa farmers, as it allows them to implement sustainable practices, such as agroforestry, and provide a financial buffer in case disasters like pest or weather patterns decrease crop yield.
Cocoa production is likely to be affected in various ways by the expected effects of global warming. Specific concerns have been raised concerning its future as a cash crop in West Africa, the current centre of global cocoa production. If temperatures continue to rise, West Africa could simply become unfit to grow the beans. The International Center for Tropical Agriculture warned in a paper published in 2013 that Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, the world's two top cocoa growers, will experience a decline in suitable areas for cocoa production as global temperatures rise by up to 2 °C by 2050.
Climate change, coupled with pests, poor soil health, and the demand for sustainable cocoa, has led to a rapid decline in cocoa productivity, resulting in reduced income for smallholder cocoa farmers. Severe droughts have led to soil fertility decline, causing a decrease in yields, and resulting in some farmers abandoning cocoa production.
Cocoa beans also have a potential to be used as a bedding material in farms for cows. Using cocoa bean husks in bedding material for cows may contribute to udder health (less bacterial growth) and ammonia levels (lower ammonia levels on bedding).
Over time, cocoa agroforestry systems become more similar to forest, although they never fully recover the original forest community within the life cycle of a productive cocoa plantation (approximately 25 years). Thus, although cocoa agroforests cannot replace natural forests, they are a valuable tool for conserving and protecting biodiversity while maintaining high levels of productivity in agricultural landscapes.
In West Africa, where about 70% of global cocoa supply originates from smallholder farmers, recent public–private initiatives such as the Cocoa Forest Initiatives in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire (World Cocoa Foundation, 2017) and the Green Cocoa Landscape Programme in Cameroon (IDH, 2019) aim to support the sustainable intensification and climate resilience of cocoa production, the prevention of further deforestation and the restoration of degraded forests. They often align with national REDD+ policies and plans.
Global market share for processing has remained stable, even as grindings increase to meet demand. One of the largest processing countries by volume is the Netherlands, handling around 13% of global grindings. Europe and Russia as a whole handle about 38% of the processing market. Average year after year demand growth has been just over 3% since 2008. While Europe and North America are relatively stable markets, increasing household income in developing countries is the main reason of the stable demand growth. As demand is awaited to keep growing, supply growth may slow down due to changing weather conditions in the largest cocoa production areas.
Cocoa powder may have a fat content of about 12%, but this varies significantly. Cocoa butter is used in chocolate bar manufacture, other confectionery, , and cosmetics.
Treating with an alkali produces Dutch process cocoa, which is less acidic, darker, and more mellow in flavor than untreated cocoa. Regular (non-alkalized) cocoa is acidic, so when cocoa is treated with an alkaline ingredient, generally potassium carbonate, the pH increases. This can be done at various stages during manufacturing, including during nib treatment, liquor treatment, or press cake treatment.
Another process that helps develop the flavor is roasting, which can be done on the whole bean before shelling or on the nib after shelling. The time and temperature of the roast affect the result: A "low roast" produces a more acid, aromatic flavor, while a high roast gives a more intense, bitter flavor lacking complex flavor notes.
The beans contain theobromine, and between 0.1% and 0.7% caffeine, whereas dry coffee beans are about 1.2% caffeine. Theobromine found in the cocoa solids is fat soluble.
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