Roughly two-thirds of the entire world’s cocoa is produced in West Africa, with 43% sourced from Côte d’Ivoire, where child labor is a common practice to obtain the product. According to the World Cocoa Foundation, some 50 million people around the world depend on cocoa as a source of livelihood. In the UK, most chocolatiers purchase their chocolate from them, to melt, mold and package to their own design.
A cacao tree
Chocolate is any product made primarily of cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
Production costs can be decreased by reducing cocoa solid content or by substituting cocoa butter with another fat. Cocoa growers object to allowing the resulting food to be called “chocolate”, due to the risk of lower demand for their crops. The sequencing in 2010 of genome of the cacao tree may allow yields to be improved.
Cocoa beans
There are two main jobs associated with creating chocolate candy, chocolate makers and chocolatiers. Chocolate makers use harvested cacao beans and other ingredients to produce couverture chocolate (covering). Chocolatiers use the finished couverture to make chocolate candies (bars, truffles, etc.). [source: Wikipedia]