How Chocolate Is Made: From Cocoa Bean to Bar in 9 Steps

The short version: cocoa pods are picked, the beans are fermented, dried and roasted, cracked into nibs, ground into a paste, conched until silky, tempered for shine and snap, then moulded. Nine steps, and most of the flavour is decided by the second one.

Ever wondered how a tiny cocoa bean turns into your favourite chocolate bar? It's a very delicious story, so sit back, grab your favourite bar and let's take a journey from cocoa bean to chocolate. With International Chocolate Day landing on 13 September, there's never been a better excuse.

The bean to bar process, step by step

 

Harvest
It all starts with the humble cocoa pod. These colourful pods grow on cacao trees, and inside each one are 30 to 50 cocoa beans surrounded by a sweet, sticky pulp. Once the pods are ripe, they're harvested and opened to remove the beans

Fermentation
Next comes fermentation, one of the most important steps in the process. The beans are left to ferment for several days, helping to develop the flavours and aromas we eventually recognise as chocolate. Interestingly, at this stage, the beans don't actually taste much like chocolate!

This is also the step that decides what a bar will end up tasting like. The same beans fermented differently give you noticeably different chocolate, which is why two bars from neighbouring farms can taste nothing alike. More on that further down.

Drying
Once fermentation is complete, the beans are dried to remove moisture, usually out in the sun for a week or so. They're then carefully selected, sorted and cleaned.

Roasting
Roasting is where those rich chocolatey flavours and wonderful aromas really begin to develop.

Cracking and winnowing
After roasting, the beans are cracked and winnowed. This removes the outer shells, leaving behind the tasty pieces inside called cocoa nibs.

Grinding
The nibs are ground into a smooth paste called cocoa mass. Depending on the type of chocolate being made, ingredients such as sugar, cocoa butter and milk powder may then be added.

Conching
Next comes conching, a process that mixes and refines the chocolate, creating that lovely smooth, silky texture we all know and love. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, and the longer it goes, the smoother the result.

Tempering
Then it's time for tempering. The chocolate is carefully heated and cooled to give it a beautiful shine, smooth texture and that satisfying snap when you break a piece. What's actually going on is the cocoa butter crystals being coaxed into lining up neatly, and it's fiddlier than it sounds. It's the step our chocolatiers do every single day, and the one most people get to try for the first time in one of our workshops.

Moulding
Finally, the chocolate is poured into moulds and left to set before being wrapped and packaged. And there you have it - a delicious chocolate bar, ready to enjoy!

Why single-origin chocolate tastes of somewhere

Every bar goes through the same nine steps. So why does a single-origin bar from Madagascar taste bright and fruity, while one from Ghana tastes deep and classic?
"Single-origin" simply means all the beans came from one place, sometimes one country, sometimes one farm. Cocoa picks up its character from the soil, the climate and, above all, how it's fermented locally. 
Blend beans from lots of places and you get a consistent, familiar flavour. Keep them from one origin and you taste the place itself, in much the same way a wine tastes of its vineyard. If you've only ever had the supermarket stuff, a single-origin bar is a genuinely different experience, and a good one to try this International Chocolate Day.

Fancy trying the tempering bit yourself?

Reading about the snap is one thing. Getting it right on a marble slab with a chocolatier at your elbow is another. Our chocolate workshops in Shoreditch and Manchester are where the bean to bar story ends up: you temper, you mould, you take home everything you make. 

And if you'd rather do it with the whole team, our corporate workshops run the same thing for groups of 8 to 200.

So next time you unwrap a piece of chocolate, take a moment to think about its incredible journey from cocoa pod to the treat in your hand.

We hope you've learned something new and gained a little more appreciation for the humble cocoa bean. After all, from small things, big (and delicious) things grow!
Happy International Chocolate Day!

Things we get asked in the kitchen

Cocoa or cacao, what's the difference?
Mostly the same thing. "Cacao" tends to be used for the raw beans and less-processed products, "cocoa" for anything roasted and processed. Marketing muddies it a bit.

Why does good chocolate snap?
Tempering. Properly tempered chocolate has its cocoa butter crystals in one tidy structure, which gives you the shine and the snap. Badly tempered chocolate goes dull, streaky and bendy.

What does single-origin mean?
All the beans came from one place, whether a country, a region or a single farm, so the bar tastes of where it grew rather than of a blend.

How long does bean to bar take?
Fermentation and drying alone take the best part of two weeks, then roasting, grinding and conching on top. Call it two to three weeks before anything goes near a mould.

Til next time,
Team MyChocolate x