Chocolate is one of those universally accepted foods that everyone agrees is sensational, but do you know how it’s made and the secret dark side behind the chocolate industry that all the big companies want you to forget? We set work experience student Oscar, the challenge of finding out all about the chocolate making process – read on to see his findings…
How does chocolate get from the farms to melting in your mouth?
Chocolate originates from pods that grow in trees called ‘cacao trees’. These cacao trees thrive in humid conditions where it’s wet and hot, for example in the rainforest. The cacao pods contain lots of seeds called ‘cacao beans’, which are the foundations for making delicious chocolate.
The cacao pods first need to be chopped off the trees. This is usually done by people (who are sometimes children) climbing up the trees, and using a machete or cutting tool, chopping off the pods. However, this is extremely dangerous as it sometimes leads to arms getting cut off and people falling from the trees. Can you imagine trying to climb up a tree with a massive sword?! This is just one way that companies and plantation owners exploit the native people and their workers, making them do extremely dangerous, difficult and tiring jobs for unbelievably low pay. This is just one of the darker sides of chocolate that Tony’s Chocolonely is promising to stop.
Once off the trees the slimy cacao beans are then scooped by hand out of the pods and left to ferment for 3-7 days. This process is done by leaving the beans out in the sun and covered in banana leaves to make sure they don’t get too hot. After several days the beans have lost some of their bitter taste and become sweeter, with a flavour more reminiscent of the chocolate you know and love.
The fermented beans, which now have a browner colour, are left to dry out in the baking sun for 4-10 days. As they dry, their chocolatey flavour intensifies. If the beans aren’t properly dried, they could mould during shipment. They can also form a sour flavour, so need to be dried thoroughly to make sure the chocolate flavour is accurately developed.
Once the beans have been shipped to their destination, they are sorted by hand into different categories:
- Large Beans
- Small Beans
- Broken/Cracked Beans
- Waste beans
Once the beans have been sorted and cleaned, the beans are roasted which refines the final chocolate flavour.
The beans must next be winnowed, where the skins/husks are removed, which surprisingly account for around 20% of the weight. This can be done by blasting air at the beans to remove the husks. The husks can be sold to farmers as mulch which can be used for fertilisers.
The beans are then ground up to make a smooth paste, often using a stone grinder. The sugar is also added in this step. The paste is refined to make the specific chocolate by adding the milk powder and cocoa butter.
Once the chocolate has been refined to create the specific chocolate that the company wants, it is tempered to stabilise the fat molecules and make sure the chocolate melts in your mouth and not your hands by making sure the fat forms the most stable crystals.
The chocolate can then be moulded in silicone moulds, packaged and delivered to stores for you to enjoy.
Tony’s Chocolonely’s Impact
Although chocolate is extremely delicious, it is haunted by child labour and the exploitation of the local people. Even in the larger brands, completely erasing exploitation is extremely difficult.
Tonys Chocolonely is one of the few big brands that vows to stop exploitation in the cocoa industry. They are able to do this because of their extra precautions such as:
- Direct Sourcing, which is where they have full traceability back to the source, which helps them prevent and eliminate exploitation.
- Fair pricing is where they pay the farmers a premium (above the Fairtrade price) to ensure they can earn a living and to tackle poverty.
- Monitoring, which is where trained community facilitators visit families and houses to raise awareness about child labour and exploitation. They consistently monitor exploitation to keep child labour under control. If they find any cases of child labour, they will help to solve it and find the root causes to prevent it from happening in the future.
Overall, chocolate takes a long time to produce, which leaves plenty of space for child labour and exploitation to go under the radar. This is where Tony’s Chocolonely comes to play, trying to completely stop exploitation while still making delicious chocolate.
