How a cacao pod forms

Cacao flowers directly from the trunk and the older, thicker branches rather than from new growth at the tips. The habit is called cauliflory and it is unusual enough that people seeing a cacao tree for the first time frequently do not recognise the flowers as flowers.

They appear on raised woody cushions that persist and flower repeatedly for years, so a mature tree carries the scars of every previous flowering. The flowers themselves are tiny — a centimetre or so across — five-petalled, pale, intricately structured, and produced in very large numbers.

A healthy tree in a suitable climate flowers more or less continuously rather than in a single spring flush, which is why a cacao tree commonly carries flowers, small developing pods and mature pods at the same time.

The flowers offer no nectar and their structure is fiddly, which rules out most familiar pollinators. The insects consistently associated with cacao pollination are very small biting midges rather than bees.

Those midges breed in damp decomposing matter — leaf litter, rotting husks, moist shaded ground — which quietly connects a management decision to a yield outcome: a farm that keeps its litter layer maintains the habitat of its own pollinators, and a swept, sun-exposed plot does not.

Only a small fraction of flowers become mature pods. Both pollination limitation and the tree's own resource limitation contribute — a tree sets far more young fruit than it can carry and sheds most of them, a normal process rather than a fault. Hand-pollination experiments have raised fruit set above natural levels, which is evidence that pollination genuinely limits yield at least some of the time.

A pollinated flower develops into a pod over a period of months. Early losses are heavy: many small pods blacken and shrivel on the tree in a process called cherelle wilt, which is the tree shedding fruit it cannot support rather than a disease.

Surviving pods enlarge, and their skin changes colour as they ripen. The direction of that change depends entirely on the genetics — some pods ripen green to yellow, others deep red or purple to orange — so ripeness cannot be read from a single colour rule and has to be learnt for the material on that farm.

Inside, the beans sit in rows embedded in a white, sweet, sharply acidic pulp. That pulp is not incidental packaging. It is the sugar source that the fermentation runs on, and its quantity and composition are part of what the next stage has to work with.

A pod cut unripe carries beans with less developed pulp and lower sugar, which gives fermentation less to work with. A pod left too long can begin germinating inside, and germinated beans ferment differently and are treated as a defect.

Because pods ripen individually rather than together, harvest means walking the trees repeatedly and cutting only what is ready. The temptation under time or labour pressure is to strip a tree in one pass, and the cost of doing so appears three stages later as an uneven ferment that no amount of care at the factory can correct.