A cocoa bean, straight off the tree, tastes nothing like chocolate. It's bitter, sour, and wrapped in sweet white pulp. Everything you recognise as chocolate flavour is put there by people, in a chain of steps that starts on a farm near the equator and ends in a factory like ours. This is the whole chain, in order, with a note on what each step is actually for.
1. Harvest and fermentation
Cocoa pods grow on the trunk and thick branches of Theobroma cacao, a small tree that only thrives within about twenty degrees of the equator. West Africa grows most of the world's crop; Latin America and Southeast Asia grow the rest. Pods are cut by hand, split open, and the beans are scooped out still coated in pulp.
Then they're left to ferment for several days, usually in heaps under banana leaves or in wooden boxes. This is the step most people have never heard of and it's the one that matters most for flavour. Wild yeasts and bacteria eat the pulp, the heap heats up, and the chemistry inside the bean changes: bitterness drops, the precursors of chocolate flavour form, and the bean turns from purple to brown. Skip fermentation and you can roast all you like; it will never taste like chocolate.
2. Drying
Fermented beans are spread out in the sun for about a week and turned regularly. Drying stops the fermentation, drops the moisture low enough for storage and shipping, and lets the acidity produced during fermentation mellow. Beans dried too quickly over fire pick up smoke; beans dried too slowly go mouldy. Good drying is quiet, careful work.
3. Roasting
Once the dried beans reach a manufacturer, they're roasted. Roasting does for cocoa what it does for coffee: it develops the flavours fermentation set up, drives off the last of the harsh acids, and loosens the papery shell around each bean. Roast temperature and time are where a maker starts to put their own stamp on the chocolate. A light roast keeps fruity, acidic notes; a darker roast pushes toward the deep, familiar "cocoa" flavour.
4. Winnowing
The roasted beans are cracked and the shells blown away, leaving the broken kernels, called nibs. Nibs are around half fat by weight. That fat is cocoa butter, and it's the reason chocolate melts at body temperature.
5. Grinding and refining
Grind nibs and the friction melts the cocoa butter, so instead of a powder you get a thick, gritty paste called cocoa liquor (no alcohol involved; "liquor" is just an old word for liquid). This is where the two main cocoa products part ways. Press the liquor and you separate cocoa butter from the solid cocoa cake, which is milled into cocoa powder. Keep it whole and you're on the way to chocolate.
To make chocolate, the liquor is mixed with sugar, usually more cocoa butter, and for milk chocolate, milk powder. Then it's refined: passed through rollers or ground in mills until the particles are too small for your tongue to detect, typically somewhere around 20 microns. Refining is why good chocolate feels smooth rather than sandy. It's also one of the stages you can watch on our factory tour.
6. Conching
Conching is slow, warm mixing, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for days. The name comes from the shell-shaped machines first used for it in the 1870s. Two things happen. Any remaining volatile acids evaporate, rounding off the flavour. And every solid particle gets coated in cocoa butter, which is what turns a stiff paste into something that flows and melts evenly. Longer conching generally means a smoother, milder chocolate. Shorter conching keeps more of the bean's edge.
7. Tempering
Cocoa butter can crystallise in six different forms, and only one of them gives you the glossy surface, clean snap and stable shelf life you expect from a bar. Tempering is the controlled heating and cooling that coaxes the fat into that one form. Untempered chocolate sets dull, soft and streaky, and blooms quickly. We've given tempering its own article because it's the step people ask about most on tours.
8. Moulding and packaging
Tempered chocolate is deposited into moulds, vibrated to shake out air bubbles, cooled, and knocked out of the mould. Then it's wrapped. Properly tempered chocolate contracts slightly as it sets, which is why a good bar drops out of its mould cleanly and why a badly tempered one sticks.
Which steps happen where
Almost no one does all eight steps under one roof. Farmers and co-operatives handle fermentation and drying. Large cocoa processors do most of the roasting, grinding and pressing. Chocolate manufacturers, including us, take it from there: we work with chocolate and cocoa from the processing stage onward, and the melting, refining, tempering, moulding and packaging happen in St. Davids. That's the part of the story you see on a visit, and it's the part that decides whether the finished chocolate is any good.
Couverture, compound and cocoa
One last distinction. Chocolate made the way described above, with cocoa butter as its only fat, is what the trade calls couverture. Compound chocolate swaps some or all of the cocoa butter for vegetable fat, which means it needs no tempering and costs less, but melts and tastes differently. We make and supply both, and explain when each makes sense in couverture vs compound chocolate.