If you've ever wondered how your chocolate cake started out, hold on to your whisk, because we're about to give you the whole scoop on chocolate. The cacao tree, called Theobroma Cacao, which grows the flowers that form the pods that contain the beans that become chocolate grows in a twenty degree zone on either side of the equator, which is the only reason most of us don't have a few trees in the yard! Originally a plant found in the forests of what is now South America harvested in the wild for thousands of years and cultivated for at least the last 600 years , chocolate made its way around the world in the sailing ships of the Spaniards. Brazil was the greatest cacao producer in the world until a blight in the form of a fungus called witches' broom arrived in 1989, wiping out most of the cocoa trees in that region. Since that time, Africa leads the world in cocoa production.
These days, the majority of chocolate beans come to manufacturers from the Ivory Coast (Cote d'Ivoire) of Africa-about 40% of all the beans in the world are grown in that nation. But around 50 million people are involved in the farming of cacao, most on small family farms in tropical regions all over the world. There are chocolate growers in
How Chocolate is made