What cacao clone codes mean

Cacao does not breed true. A seed from an outstanding tree gives a tree that is not that tree, so the only way to keep a specific individual is to copy it — by grafting or by cuttings. Every copy is a clone, and the whole population of copies is referred to by the name of the original.

Because the individual matters that much, twentieth-century cacao improvement consisted largely of hunting for good trees, giving them a number, and distributing copies. The codes are the residue of that work, and there are thousands of them.

The letters are an abbreviation of whoever made the selection. The number is a serial within that programme, and it means nothing beyond the order of collection or accession.

ICS — Imperial College Selection — is a Trinidadian series from the early twentieth century, widely planted and widely used as a parent. TSH, Trinidad Selected Hybrid, is a later Trinidadian series from a deliberate breeding programme rather than a survey of existing trees. EET selections come from Ecuador's tropical experimental station and are central to Ecuadorian material. IMC and Pound codes trace to collecting expeditions in the upper Amazon: IMC 67 in particular became one of the most widely used rootstocks and breeding parents in the world, and Pound 7 is named for the collector rather than for any property of the tree.

Scavina selections, of which Scavina 6 is the famous one, came from the same region and became foundational to global breeding for a single reason covered below. CCN-51 is Ecuadorian and is the most commercially consequential clone of the last half-century.

So a code tells you a provenance and a serial. It does not encode quality, and there is no ranking implied by the numbers.

The reason certain codes appear everywhere is disease, not flavour.

When witches' broom and other diseases devastated producing regions, breeding programmes needed sources of resistance, and a small number of collected genotypes turned out to carry it. Scavina 6 is the clearest case: a resistance donor used so extensively across so many programmes that its genetics are behind a great deal of the world's planted material.

This has a consequence worth stating plainly. Breeding for resistance concentrated the gene pool, because everyone drew on the same successful donors. A crop already narrow in its planted diversity became narrower — which is one of the mechanisms behind the monoculture risk the sustainability section describes, and a genuine reason field collections of living trees matter.

Craft chocolate has a recurring narrative: an old, nearly extinct, exceptionally fine population is found somewhere remote, genetically confirmed, and turned into a bar.

Some of these are real. Fortunato No 4 — material from the Marañón valley in northern Peru — is the best-known, and Guasare refers to an ancient Venezuelan Criollo population that appears in genetics research. These are documented findings and the genetic work behind them is real work.

What to be careful of is the inference. Confirming that a population is genetically ancient, or distinct, or rare, says nothing on its own about how the chocolate tastes. Flavour in the bar is dominated by fermentation and post-harvest handling, with genetics a real but secondary contributor — the ordering this catalogue applies everywhere. A verified rare genotype badly fermented makes poor chocolate, and no amount of sequencing changes that.

So the genetics claim and the flavour claim are separate claims, and a story that presents the first as evidence for the second has skipped the step that actually decides the outcome.

This catalogue carries pages for Criollo, Forastero, Trinitario, Nacional, Amelonado, Porcelana, Chuncho, Arriba Nacional, CCN-51 and the regional hybrid group, and it stops there deliberately.

What can honestly be written about an individual clone code, without a bar in front of you and without the fermentation record, is its programme and its serial. That is a database entry, not a page, and dressing it up as one would give a reader something authoritative-looking that answers nothing they asked.

CCN-51 has a page because it is a genuine subject — a clone whose commercial spread changed what the world's chocolate is made from, and which is argued about on its own terms. That is the bar. A code becomes a page when there is something to say about it beyond its identity.