Cacao is the tree Theobroma cacao and the fruit it bears: a ribbed pod of seeds wrapped in sweet white pulp. The seeds become chocolate, the pulp a fresh juice, the husk a tea. At Bantu Chocolate we use all three, from one family-owned estate in Cameroon, because to us cacao was never just a bean.
Most people only ever meet cacao at the very end of its journey: a bar, a tin of powder, a word on a café menu. By then it has been fermented, dried, shipped, roasted, ground and renamed. On our estate it is still a fruit, heavy in the hand, that you can split open with your thumbs. That is where its story really begins.
Is chocolate a fruit?
Not quite, but it begins as one. Chocolate is made from the seeds of a fruit: the cacao pod is the fruit of the tree, and the beans are its seeds. Ferment them, dry them, roast them and grind them, and those seeds become chocolate.
Every bar you have ever eaten began as fruit on a tree, somewhere warm, picked by someone’s hands. The industry rarely mentions it. We think it is the most beautiful thing about chocolate.
What is a cacao pod?
A cacao pod is the fruit of the cacao tree: oval, ridged, about the size of a small rugby ball, ripening to yellow, orange, red or deep purple depending on the variety.
Cacao does something few fruit trees do: its pods grow straight from the trunk and the thickest branches, not from the tips of the twigs. On our estate the trees stand in the shade of taller forest trees, as cacao does in the wild.
What is inside a cacao pod?
Crack open a ripe pod and you find several dozen seeds packed in neat rows, each wrapped in soft, white, sweet pulp. The seeds are the cacao beans, the part the world trades. The pulp is what holds them together, and it is the part the world forgets.
The thick outer shell, the husk, makes up most of the pod’s weight. On most farms it is thrown away. We dry ours and brew it into tea.
What is cacao pulp?
Cacao pulp is the soft white flesh around the beans. It is sweet and bright, and people tasting it for the first time often reach for the names of other tropical fruits to describe it.
Most of the world never gets to taste it. On most farms the pulp never leaves the fermenting heap: as the beans ferment it melts into a sweet liquid called cocoa sweatings, which drains away and is thrown out, and the International Cocoa Organization notes that it is mostly gone by the second day (ICCO). The market pays for the bean, so the bean is all most farms can afford to keep (read more on cacao by-products).
On our estate we keep it. We press the pulp into juice for Boocha, a sparkling cacao fruit juice kombucha. The idea came from our founder’s childhood, sucking the sweet pulp from pods at her grandmother’s house, a story told in the story behind Boocha. Read more about the juice itself in cacao pulp juice. Researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute are exploring new uses for cocoa pulp too (Fraunhofer IVV).
How does cacao become chocolate?
- Harvest. Ripe pods are cut from the tree by hand, one at a time.
- Open. Each pod is split and the pulp-covered beans are scooped out.
- Ferment. Beans and pulp ferment together for around two to five days, depending on the variety. This is where flavour begins.
- Dry. The beans are spread out in the sun until they are dry enough to keep.
- Roast. The dried beans are roasted to draw out their flavour.
- Crack and winnow. The shells are cracked away, leaving cacao nibs.
- Grind. The nibs are ground into a smooth paste, then mixed and refined into chocolate.
On our estate, the first four steps, harvest, opening, fermentation and drying, happen where the trees grow, by people who know them. That matters more than it sounds. Fermentation is where flavour begins, and for most chocolate it happens thousands of miles from the brand whose name ends up on the wrapper. Our chocolate is then made bean-to-bar by our specialist co-manufacturing partner.
Where does cacao come from?
Cacao is native to the upper Amazon, where people in what is now Ecuador were already using it more than 5,300 years ago (Science News). It will only grow in a warm, wet band around the equator, roughly 20 degrees north and south.
Cacao did not arrive in Cameroon as a gift. It came in the late 1880s, under German colonial rule, as a plantation crop grown for export.
Grown in Africa, named elsewhere
Cameroon’s national cocoa and coffee board dates cacao’s arrival to 1886 or 1887. German firms planted the first estates at Bimbia and Bibundi, near the coast, and from 1903 a head tax pushed Cameroonians into plantation work to pay it (ONCC).
More than a century later, the shape of the trade has barely moved. Two West African countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, still dominate the world’s cocoa supply (Cocoa Barometer 2025), yet the farmers who grow it receive on average around 6% of the final value of a chocolate bar (Fairtrade). The fruit is grown in one place; the names on the bars belong to another.
We did not start Bantu Chocolate to argue with that history. We started it to write the next chapter differently: cacao grown on our family’s estate in Cameroon, made into chocolate that carries the name of the place it comes from. Not as a correction, as a celebration.
One fruit, many rituals
Nothing from our estate goes to waste. The bean becomes chocolate, such as the six-bar Karnak Solstice collection and our darkest bar, Noire 73%. The pulp becomes Boocha. The husk becomes tea. The whole fruit, finally, gets to be what it is.
Read next: cacao vs cocoa, what is the difference? and drinking chocolate vs hot chocolate vs hot cocoa.
FAQs
The Cacao Fruit
Not quite, but it begins as one. The cacao pod is the fruit, and the beans inside it are its seeds, which are fermented, dried, roasted and ground into chocolate.
Yes. Where cacao grows, people eat the sweet, bright pulp straight from the pod. The raw seeds are bitter, so they are usually fermented and roasted first.
On most farms the pulp drains away during fermentation and is thrown out. On our estate we press it into juice for Boocha, a cacao fruit juice kombucha, so that part of the fruit is not lost.
An oval, ridged fruit about the size of a small rugby ball, ripening to yellow, orange, red or purple. It grows straight from the trunk and the main branches of the tree.
In a warm, wet band around 20 degrees either side of the equator. Cacao is native to the Amazon and reached Cameroon in the late 1800s.
Written by Bantu Chocolate.
