Cacao

Cocoa is the processed product made from the beans of the cacao plant, an evergreen plant that grows to about 4.5m to 7.5m in height in the lowland rainforests of the Amazon River basins. They cannot survive in very dry weather and thrive in climates with high humidity and rainfall. The flowers and fruits, called pods, which can be 10cm to 25cm long, grow from its trunk. When the pod is young it is green in colour, turning yellow, red or purple when ripe. Each pod contains 20 to 60 reddish-brown cocoa beans up to 2.5cm long that are generally arranged in five rows surrounded by a sugary pulp. The pods are harvested at the end of the wet, or rainy, season and it takes seven to fourteen pods to produce about 500g of dry cocoa beans.