No matter who you ask, just about everyone loves chocolate. It is one of the most popular sweet treats on Earth. You’ve probably eaten chocolate since you were a kid and never thought much about it. It is so easily accessible in many parts of the world that having a piece of chocolate is a simple thing we don’t think about much. But how much do you really know about chocolate? There is actually a lot of mystery around chocolate that many people don’t realize. Read on to learn 9 fascinating facts about chocolate you probably never knew before.
Chocolate is actually a fruit!
Well, it is not quite a fruit all by itself, but it is close. Chocolate is a part of the Theobroma tree that produces the cacao pods that chocolate is made from. The cacao pods are harvested and the beans are removed, roasted, and ground into the form that we know and enjoy as chocolate.
400 beans are used to make a pound of chocolate.
A lot of cacao beans must be harvested to make just one pound of chocolate. Each cacao pod contains about 40 beans, so this means that farmers must harvest a lot of beans from the Theobroma tree to make as much chocolate as the world enjoys continuously.
The Theobroma tree makes a lot of beans per season.
For every year that they live, a Theobroma tree can produce around 2500 beans each harvest season. This means that each tree can yield about 6.25 pounds of chocolate. This roughly translates into about 33 big chocolate bars. That means a lot of trees are needed to keep the chocolate coming.
