How Chocolate Is Made: From Cocoa Bean to Bar
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Chocolate starts as the seeds of a tropical tree. On the farm, the seeds are taken out of the pod, fermented in their own pulp and dried in the sun. At the factory they are cleaned, roasted and shelled, and the broken pieces left over, the nibs, are ground into a thick paste called cocoa liquor. Sugar goes in next, often with extra cocoa butter, and milk powder if it’s going to be milk chocolate. The mix is refined until it feels smooth, conched, tempered and finally molded into bars.
The whole process on one page
The chain has two halves. The farm turns fresh, wet seeds into dry fermented cocoa beans that can survive shipping. The factory turns those beans into chocolate, and along the way it can branch off to make cocoa butter and cocoa powder.
The order varies from maker to maker. Some roast whole beans and shell them afterward; others shell first and roast the nibs. Pressing and alkalizing are optional. In the outline of the steps by the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), chocolate goes from liquor straight to mixing, while cocoa powder takes the pressing route.
On the farm
The farm’s job is to turn a wet, perishable fruit into a dry, stable bean that already carries the beginnings of chocolate flavor.
Growing and harvesting cacao pods
Cacao pods are cut from the tree by hand, split open, and the beans are scooped out with their sticky white pulp. The tree is Theobroma cacao, a name built from the Greek for “food of the gods”, and a 2022 review by Díaz-Muñoz and De Vuyst places its likely origin in the western Upper Amazon. Its flowers, and so its pods, grow straight from the trunk and thick branches, as Jean-Marie and colleagues describe. A young tree takes 3 to 5 years to give its first crop, according to ICCO.
Cacao needs heat and rain, and it grows close to the Equator. ICCO gives two widths for that belt. Its Growing Cocoa page puts production between 10° north and 10° south, while its FAQ says the tree grows best between about 20° north and 20° south.
Harvesting is still manual. ICCO’s harvesting guide describes workers cutting each ripe pod with a clean stroke through the stalk using a sharp blade, and using a blade on a long pole for pods out of reach. ICCO warns that a careless cut damages the flower cushions the future pods grow from. Most producing countries have two harvests a year, a main crop and a smaller mid-crop.
Pods are opened within a week to 10 days of harvest. ICCO recommends a wooden club; a machete is common, though it can cut into the beans. Inside a cocoa pod sit about 20 to 60 beans in five rows, wrapped in sweet pulp, according to a 2022 review by Jean-Marie and colleagues.
Most cocoa comes from small farms. In West Africa, which ICCO says supplies about 70% of the world’s cocoa, many farms have less than a hectare planted with it. Côte d’Ivoire is by far the largest producer in both of the main data sets.
Second place depends on whose figures you read, and the gap is large. FAOSTAT puts Indonesia second in 2024, at 632,702 metric tons, while ICCO’s Quarterly Bulletin of Cocoa Statistics estimates 180,000 metric tons for the 2023/24 cocoa year, behind Ghana and Ecuador.
Fermentation: where flavor starts
Fermentation is where chocolate flavor begins: for several days, yeasts and bacteria feed on the pulp around the beans, the heat and acid they produce kill the seed, and the bean’s chemistry starts to change. Unfermented or under-fermented beans taste so flat that, according to ICCO, they end up pressed for cocoa butter rather than made into chocolate.
The setup is low-tech. Díaz-Muñoz and De Vuyst describe beans and pulp piled in heaps, wooden boxes, baskets or trays and covered with banana leaves. ICCO adds that larger growers tend to use boxes and smaller growers heaps on the ground, and that turning or moving the beans lets air in, which speeds up the bacteria.
Three groups of microbes do the work, and their turns overlap. Yeasts dominate first: they turn the pulp’s sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide and break down the pulp. Lactic acid bacteria are active alongside them, making lactic acid from the sugars and using up the pulp’s citric acid. Later, once air gets into the mass, acetic acid bacteria turn the alcohol into acetic acid, the acid that makes vinegar sour, and that reaction gives off heat. ICCO says the mass reaches 40 to 45 °C in the first 48 hours, and a food-chemistry review by Barišić and colleagues describes a final phase at 50 °C or higher.
The acid soaks into the beans and, with the heat, kills the seed embryo, by the second day according to ICCO. From there the bean’s own chemistry takes over, as both reviews describe: its cell structure breaks down, its enzymes split proteins into smaller pieces, sugar is broken down and polyphenols oxidize. The results are flavor precursors, the raw material that roasting will turn into chocolate flavor.
Fermentation lasts 2 to 10 days, depending on the cocoa variety and local practice, in Díaz-Muñoz and De Vuyst’s account. ICCO gives about 5 days for Forastero beans and 2 to 3 for Criollo. One farm study in Peru, by Castro-Alayo and colleagues, fermented both fine and bulk cocoa in the same boxes for 7 days.
ICCO’s processing guide treats chocolate flavor as something built twice, once on the farm in fermentation and once in the factory at roasting: “Good chocolate flavour cannot be produced by adhering to only one of these stages.” Part of what you taste in a finished bar was set in motion under those banana leaves.
More in the glossary: fermentation.
Drying and shipping
After fermentation the beans are dried, mostly in the sun, until they can be stored and shipped without going moldy. ICCO gives a drop from about 55 to 60% moisture down to about 7.5%, and most studies, including a 2025 review by Santander and colleagues, cite a target of 6 to 8%.
Smallholders spread the wet beans on raised bamboo mats or concrete platforms, says ICCO. Others use dryers fired with wood or fuel. Sun drying is the norm: a review by Dzelagha and colleagues puts it at over 60% of African and Asian cocoa, taking anywhere from 7 to 22 days depending on the weather. In West Africa, ICCO notes, it rarely finishes in less than a week.
Speed matters in both directions. Dry too fast and the chemistry started in fermentation doesn’t finish, leaving acidic, bitter beans. Dry too slowly and mold and off-flavors can develop. ICCO, which warns about both, also cites research saying bean temperature during drying should stay below 65 °C. Beans dried over a wood fire can pick up smoky, hammy notes, according to Santander and colleagues. Once dry, the beans are bagged and shipped. See also drying.
At the factory: from bean to liquor
At the factory, the dried beans are inspected, cleaned, roasted, cracked and shelled, and the nibs are ground into cocoa liquor.
Cleaning and sorting
Beans are inspected when they arrive and then cleaned before they go anywhere near the roaster, as ICCO’s processing guide describes. A farm product that has spent days on drying mats and then traveled in sacks needs it.
Roasting
Roasting is the second half of flavor-making. Heat makes the precursors formed during fermentation react with each other, mainly through the Maillard reaction, and the typical chocolate aroma appears, as Djikeng and colleagues describe. Roasting also reduces unwanted compounds and decontaminates the beans, according to Barišić and colleagues. Published roasts mostly sit between 120 and 150 °C, from 5 to 120 minutes, in the figures gathered by Di Mattia and colleagues and by Barišić and colleagues. Read any roast temperature with care: the oven setting and the temperature the beans actually reach are not the same number. In ICCO’s words, “there is not a right or wrong roast level”. Each maker picks one for the flavor they want.
Makers roast either whole beans or nibs, and that choice sets whether shelling comes before or after this step. See roasting.
Cracking and winnowing
Cracking and winnowing break the beans and separate the shell from the nib, the part that becomes chocolate. ICCO lists winnowing, cracking, fanning and hulling as names for the same job, and notes that a clean split is driven by economics, product quality and, in many countries, regulation. US rules, for example, cap the shell left in cacao nibs at 1.75% by weight under 21 CFR 163.110.
Shell left in the nibs hurts the final product, so the beans are shelled either before or after roasting, as Delgado-Ospina and colleagues note. The result is cocoa nibs. More on winnowing.
Grinding into cocoa liquor
Grinding turns the solid nibs into a liquid paste that Di Mattia and colleagues call cocoa liquor, or cocoa mass. There’s no alcohol in it; the name just means liquid. US rules (21 CFR 163.111) define chocolate liquor as finely ground nibs with 50 to 60% cacao fat by weight, and the same product can be sold there as “unsweetened chocolate” or “baking chocolate”.
From here the paste goes one of two ways: on to become chocolate, or into a press. See cocoa liquor.
Pressing: cocoa butter and cocoa powder
Some cocoa liquor never becomes chocolate. Instead it goes into a hydraulic press, which squeezes out the cocoa butter and leaves a solid cake that is ground into cocoa powder, as ICCO’s processing guide describes.
Cocoa butter goes back into chocolate recipes, and ICCO calls it the most expensive of chocolate’s main ingredients. The cake is broken up and milled into cocoa powder. The powder gets tempered too: ICCO describes holding it at set temperatures for set times so the cocoa butter left in it crystallizes in a stable form.
How much fat a cocoa powder keeps depends on where it is sold. Under US rules (21 CFR 163.112), “breakfast cocoa” has at least 22% cacao fat. The EU’s Directive 2000/36/EC requires at least 20% cocoa butter by dry weight for cocoa powder.
Alkalization, also called Dutch processing, is an optional extra step. Nibs, liquor or press cake are mixed with an alkaline solution, such as potassium carbonate, and heated. ICCO says it changes the flavor and color, with results from light red to almost black. A 2024 review by Palma-Morales and colleagues adds that it softens harsh notes and helps the powder mix into liquids. In the US, the label has to say “Processed with alkali” (21 CFR 163.112). See Dutch-process cocoa.
From liquor to chocolate
To turn cocoa liquor into chocolate, makers mix in sugar and any extra cocoa butter, grind the mix until it feels smooth, conch it, adjust how it flows and temper it before it is molded.
Mixing the recipe (dark, milk, white)
The recipe sets the type of chocolate. Dark chocolate is liquor, sugar and often extra cocoa butter. Milk chocolate adds milk powder. White chocolate leaves the brown part of the bean out and uses cocoa butter, milk and sugar. Many recipes also add a small amount of emulsifier, such as lecithin. What each type contains, what the percentage on the wrapper means and how ruby fits in is all in the types of chocolate explained.
Refining
Refining grinds the sugar and cocoa particles in the mix until the tongue no longer reads them as grit. Large factories mostly use roller refiners, according to Breen and colleagues. Most small-batch makers use stone melangers, which are cheaper and grind for hours. How fine counts as smooth, and how the three main machine types compare, is in chocolate refining explained.
Conching
Conching is long, warm mixing that finishes the texture and rounds off the flavor. A 2024 study by Guckenbiehl and colleagues describes it breaking up the particle clumps left by refining, freeing the fat trapped inside so the chocolate flows better, and shifting aroma compounds between the cocoa particles, the cocoa butter and the sugar. Chocolate refining explained goes into that research.
Then comes standardizing, which ICCO lists as part of chocolate making: the maker adjusts how thick the chocolate is with a little more fat or emulsifier, so it behaves in the molding or coating machine. That thickness is its viscosity.
Tempering
Tempering is heating, cooling and stirring the chocolate so the cocoa butter sets in one stable crystal form. Cocoa butter can crystallize in several forms (its polymorphs), and only one gives the gloss, the clean snap and the easy release from the mold that a good bar should have. Why that is, and when you can skip it, is in what tempering is and why it matters. How to temper chocolate at home covers the method. More in the glossary: tempering.
Get it wrong and the chocolate can turn gray and streaky within a day or two, which is fat bloom, as Lonchampt and Hartel describe. Fat bloom and sugar bloom are covered in why chocolate turns white. See also bloom.
Molding, cooling and wrapping
Tempered chocolate is poured or deposited into molds, cooled until it sets, then knocked out and wrapped. How long a wrapped bar keeps is covered in how long chocolate lasts. The same chocolate can coat a center instead, which is enrobing, or line a mold as a thin shell for a filled bonbon. If you’d like to try that at home, start with how to make chocolate bonbons. Factories also deposit chocolate as drops and chips, covered in how chocolate drops and chips are made industrially. Glossary: molding, cooling tunnel.
Bean-to-bar makers vs industrial factories: what changes
There is no official definition of bean-to-bar or craft chocolate, as a 2020 study by Brown and colleagues points out. The term is used for a maker that starts with cocoa beans and makes the finished chocolate itself. The Penn State authors proposed a craft definition with three parts: the company makes chocolate from the bean, isn’t owned by one of the five big multinationals, and was founded in the wave of new makers since 1996.
The steps are the same. What changes is scale and who does the work. In a 2021 paper, Cadby describes craft makers working in much smaller, more varied batches and doing by hand much of what an industrial plant automates, so their chocolate takes far more labor to make. Sourcing differs too. Craft makers often buy specialty beans through direct trade, Cadby writes, while the commodity cocoa used for industrial chocolate comes mainly from Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. In direct trade, according to Brown’s team, buyers travel to the producing country, discuss post-harvest processing with the farmer and typically pay more than the fair trade price. The line is getting blurry. Cadby points to companies that were never considered craft now making premium and bean-to-bar chocolate. “Artisan” is no clearer: in Brown’s study, 49% of craft makers called themselves artisan, and the only shared meaning of the word was “not industrial”. Glossary: bean-to-bar.
Real chocolate, compound and what the label tells you
Real chocolate gets its fat from cocoa butter; compound chocolate swaps most or all of it for other vegetable fats. Under Directive 2000/36/EC, EU chocolate may contain up to 5% of six approved vegetable fats as long as the label says “contains vegetable fats in addition to cocoa butter”, while the US standards for chocolate leave other fats off the list of allowed ingredients entirely. What compound is made of, why it doesn’t need tempering, where couverture fits and how the EU, US and Codex minimums compare is all in real vs compound chocolate.
Where to go next
If you mainly eat chocolate, read the types of chocolate explained next, then real vs compound chocolate. Between them they cover most of what is printed on a wrapper. Then try how to taste chocolate like a professional and cocoa origins compared. For health questions, see what the research says about dark chocolate.
If you want to make something, start with what tempering is, then try tempering at home. Once that works, bonbons are the next step up.
If you are thinking about making chocolate from the bean, the bean-to-bar process walks through every step a maker controls, and chocolate refining explained shows what the machines do and what they cost you in time. For a business plan, how to start a chocolate factory covers equipment, costs and steps.
Every term linked on this page, from pod and nib to polymorph and viscosity, has a short entry in the chocolate glossary.
Sources and open questions
Also used above, without a link in the text: Clark et al., 2020 on stone melangers, and Blanco et al., 2019 on how conching frees trapped fat.
ICCO’s two widths for the cocoa belt may describe where most cocoa is grown versus where the tree does well; the pages don’t say.
One ICCO page gives fermentation times that don’t match ICCO’s own variety figures, so the peer-reviewed 2 to 10 days is used above.
The FAO and ICCO production figures for Indonesia are more than three times apart. The two count different periods (calendar year versus an October to September cocoa year), but that doesn’t explain a gap that size, and we couldn’t find what does.
We couldn’t confirm the pressing temperature for cocoa liquor that one ICCO page gives, so none appears here, or trace any independent account of how the industrial supply chain splits the work between companies that grind beans and companies that make chocolate.