When it comes to sweets and treats, chocolate takes the cake, so to speak. On a more serious note, chocolate is, without a doubt, one of the most popular and appreciated desserts worldwide, and for good reason.
This indulgent and widespread product that has been around for thousands of years in different forms provides a unique multi-sensory experience, given its complex flavor, enticing aroma, rich color, and smooth texture that simply melts in your mouth.
It also doesn’t hurt that there’s a multitude of chocolate combinations one can choose from and a wide range of desserts that feature chocolate as the main ingredient. All in all, chocolate is a crowd pleaser, as it can satisfy everyone’s sweet tooth.
However, despite its popularity and prevalence, there are plenty of things that people don’t know about chocolate. Very few chocolate lovers know what’s happening behind the scenes, as most never bother to look beyond the bars and candies, and into the origins, sourcing, production, supply chain, and other parts of the journey that chocolate takes from bean to the final products.
So, if you’re curious to learn more about your favorite dessert, let’s dive into some interesting facts and curiosities that will help you become a more educated – and hopefully a more conscious – chocolate consumer.
The history
While the many forms and shapes that chocolate comes in nowadays are more or less recent inventions, chocolate in itself is by no means a modern dessert. Quite the contrary, it has a long and rich history behind it, being one of the oldest natural food products known to man.
According to historians, the origins of chocolate began in ancient Mesoamerica, over 5000 years ago, when the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations first started cultivating and consuming cacao, mainly as a bitter beverage. Researchers came to this conclusion after discovering ancient vessels in Ecuador that had traces of cacao on them.
The rest of the world was introduced to cocoa beans much later, after Christopher Columbus brought a few cocoa beans with him from his 1502 voyage, and then, in 1519, the Spanish conquistadors were served a chocolate beverage by the Aztecs.
However, it wasn’t until 1585 that the first official shipment of cocoa beans from present-day Mexico to Spain took place, and from there, the beans eventually spread all across the world. It would take a few more centuries until the creation of the first chocolate bar in 1847, which is attributed to British chocolatier J.S. Fry and Sons.
The terminology
Cacao, cocoa, and chocolate – a lot of people still get a bit confused by the terminology, so let’s clear that up first. Cacao trees are the plants that produce the cacao pods, which contain the raw cacao beans.
After harvesting, the cacao beans undergo several processing stages involving fermentation, drying, and grinding, and so they get turned into cocoa mass. This can then be processed into cocoa butter and cocoa powder, both of which are used in the production of chocolate.
A fun fact is that the word “cocoa”, which is now used to describe the processed cacao, comes from a spelling or pronunciation error made by English importers in the 18th century when the ingredient started to become more popular across Europe and got translated incorrectly from Spanish. Today, these two terms are often used interchangeably, despite the raw vs. processed differentiation.
As for etymology, both the term cacao and chocolate are believed to have Aztec origins, with chocolate coming from the Aztec word xocolatl, which is said to be a combination of the words xococ (bitter) and atl (water). Cacao, on the other hand, derives from the word cacahuatl, which the Aztecs used to describe the Theobroma cacao tree.
The sources
At the moment, nearly 70% of the world’s cocoa production is ensured by countries in West Africa, most precisely Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Latin America and Southeast Asia are also important cacao producers, making up for the rest of the amount.
Chocolate may have become a widely consumed good, with the most renowned chocolate companies in the world being based in Europe and North America, but the production of cacao remains concentrated in just a few regions of the globe. All cocoa ingredients are obtained from the beans of cacao trees grown on farms located in hot and humid climates around the equator.
The height of the cacao trees ranges from 20 to 39 feet, and their flowers bloom all year round. Another interesting fact is that cocoa trees typically take five years from plantation to start bearing fruit, and while they can live up to 100 years, they are most productive for about 25 to 30 years.
The climate challenge
Climate change is impacting all types of harvests, and cacao crops are no exception. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, floods, diseases, and shifting weather patterns are all causing issues for farmers, affecting both the quantity and quality of their yield and leading to cocoa shortages whose effects reverberate all throughout the industry.
With the global supply of cocoa facing a severe crisis and expected to decline even further in the future, the pressure on the supply chain is also increasing, as it’s becoming harder and harder for chocolate companies to find retailers from whom they can buy cocoa wholesale at reasonable prices. Vendors and manufacturers often have no choice but to increase prices in order to maintain profit margins.
This also raises the issue of sustainability, as cocoa farming is linked to deforestation, which only accentuates the climate crisis. This prompts industry players to look for solutions and practices that are less harmful to the environment and approach cacao production in a more sustainable manner.
We hope that this short foray into the fascinating world of chocolate has brought you newfound appreciation for this versatile and universally beloved treat and made you a little bit more curious about the food industry in general.
Article and permission to publish here provided by Mary Hall. Originally written for Supply Chain Game Changer and published on July 25, 2025.
Cover image provided by vecteezy.com.