How chocolate is manufactured

mohd Wardi Hj Tuah
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Group5
Chocolate is a key ingredient in many foods, candy bars, milk shakes, cookies, flavored coffee — even cereal and medicine!. In fact, it ranks as the favorite flavor of most peoples. And yet, few of us know the unique origins of this popular treat.

The first step in manufacturing the chocolates is to harvest a cacao tree. The cacao tree must be about five years old before it begins to flower. Cacao pods ripen throughout the year, but main harvests occur twice yearly. Farmers use hand tools to harvest ripe cacao pods.

They use a machete (in malay we called it ‘parang’) to slice ripe pods from the tree and gather them into baskets. Next, farmers split open the pods with their machetes and scoop out the pulp covered cacao seeds by hands. Then they pile these seeds under banana leaves to ferment. The farmers then dried the fermented cacao seeds in the sun on rooftops, tables or large mats. Drying cacao seeds keeps them from getting moldy during shipping. Once the seeds have finished drying, the farmers scoop them into sacks. Each sacks can weighed anywhere from 130 to 200 pounds. When the seeds arrive at the factory, they were cleaned and sorted by type. Then they were sent to giant, rotating ovens where they will be roasted. The roasting process makes cacao shells rather brittle. Now it’s time to send the seeds through a machine called a winnower, which removes thin shells.

After that, the cacao nibs are ready for the mill. Heavy metal discs do the work, grinding the nibs into a thick paste that will eventually become chocolate. To make chocolate, the manufacturer blends un-pressed chocolate liquor with condensed milk, sugar and extra cacao butter. Machine shakes the liquor to mix the ingredients. Next, the thick chocolates crumb needs to be refined to make the chocolates even silkier. Giant steel rollers do the job of smoothing out the rough mixture. It won’t be long now until we have our candy bar. But first, the refined chocolate must be kneaded and churned one more time in a cinching machine. Lastly, the chocolate must be tempered to give it a glossy sheen and smoothness. Then it can be poured into a mold.

As you can see, chocolate manufacture is a difficult process. If you follow the steps described then you will be a successful chocolate manufacturer.