What Is the Process of Cocoa Beans to Chocolate?

Many of us know that little cocoa beans are responsible for delicious chocolate. However, understanding the exact process that they go through to get there is quite exciting.

The following information was provided by the most recognizable and well known chocolate manufacturer in the world: Hershey.

Harvesting Cocoa Beans

Cocoa beans first have to be harvested from the pods, which is the large shell in which they grow. They are grown and harvested from various parts of the world; however, approximately two thirds of the cocoa beans come from Africa.

Blending and Roasting

Cocoa beans are unloaded by hand and transported to storage silos. They go into screening and cleaning machines to get rid of the pulp from the pods and any other excess materials. Since different flavors come from different regions of the word, the cocoa beans are sorted by the country of origin.

Blending and roasting machines help to bring out the desired flavor. Large revolving roasters are used to roast the beans, and heat in the roasters also helps to bring out the flavor in the beans even more.

Extracting Chocolate Goodness

Next, the cocoa beans go into a chamber to be broken into pieces. They are shattered into fragments in order to separate the shell from the nib, which is the part of the bean that is actually used to make the chocolate. The nibs go through a milling process consisting of three sets of millstones to remove their liquid-chocolate liquor.

The cocoa butter is then extracted, leaving solid chocolate cakes after the extracting process. The factory then takes these cakes and turns them into cocoa powder for your favorite chocolate drinks.

The chocolate liquor and the cocoa butter go on to create delicious blends of chocolate bars and candies.

Adding Other Ingredients

The chocolate liquor and the cocoa butter travel on to be mixed together with sugar and milk. First, the milk and the sugar are mixed together until they form a taffy-like substance. Then the chocolate liquor is added to make what is known as a chocolate crumb. The cocoa butter is added to make it creamy and to taste rich. By going through steel rollers, the crumb is turned into chocolate paste.

Chocolate As We Know It

After the paste is formed, the chocolate is put into vats, which have granite rollers to get rid of all the remaining crumbs within the paste. This can take from one to three full days to complete.

After this process is done, the paste form is cooled to the right temperature to create the chocolate bars. At this point during the process, any additional ingredients, such as nuts, are added into the mixture before they are formed into bars.

See Chocolate Made

If you want to learn more about the chocolate making process or see it in action, consider visiting the Hershey manufacturing park located in Deery, Pennsylvania.