Chocolate: Where does it come from ? First of all to make a chocolate bar you need to start off in a cacao farm. One can find the farms in countries such as: Ivory Coast, India, Indonesia or Brazil. In a cacao farm you will find cacao trees holding a lot of cacao pods. The pods can be yellow or dark red in color and can be about the size of a rugby ball! Inside the enormous pod you can find cocoa beans. Cocoa beans are usually white or purple. The pod can hold up to 40 beans.

Cadbury In 1824, John Cadbury opened a grocer’s store at 93 Bull Street, Birmingham. Among other things, he sold cocoa and drinking chocolate, which he prepared himself using a pestle and mortar. By 1842 John Cadbury was selling no less than 16 varieties of drinking chocolate and 11 different cocoas!

“ The food of the gods ” The Aztecs, Inca and Mayan were Central and Southern American people who lived in the ancient times. They were the first people to discover cacao pods and that we could make some delicious food with It! Mixing the cacao beans with spices they made a frothy chocolate drink. They drank it during religious ceremonies and named it “ The food of the gods”.

Fairtrade Fairtrade is all about better prices, decent working conditions and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers. For a number of commodities which are typically grown in developing countries and sold to developed countries (e.g. bananas, sugar, tea, etc..), the idea is to achieve a more sustainable and balanced relationship between buyers and sellers. Cocoa is one of the commodities which is targeted for establishing Fairtrade.

Chocolate today Nowadays you can find chocolate in almost every supermarket and grocery store in lots of developed countries through the world. It is also one of the most common sweets on earth ! Now, when someone says “chocolate”, people don’t think about gods or cocoa beans, they think about chocolate bars and sweets ! What do you think when I say “chocolate” ? Be careful however… like any other candy too much chocolate is not healthy, so don’t eat too much!