Cacao varieties
Four names that the whole trade uses, and that population genetics does not support in the form they are usually given.
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Criollo, Forastero and Trinitario — with Nacional often added as a fourth — is the account every chocolate wrapper, tasting course and consumer article uses. It is a trade classification of long standing, and it does not correspond to how the species is actually structured: population-genetics work published from 2008 onwards resolved Theobroma cacao into roughly ten clusters that cut across the traditional names.
“Forastero” is the weakest of the four. It is close to a residual category meaning “not Criollo”, and it covers populations across the Amazon that differ from each other as much as either differs from Criollo.
ChocolateHQ keeps the traditional names, because they are what readers arrive with and what the trade uses. Every record below is required by its own schema to carry both a classification caveat and a statement of what remains genuinely unknown — there is no way to author a variety page here that repeats the tidy version.
The prestige name in cacao: pale beans, low bitterness, delicate aromatics, and a scarcity claim that circulates without a traceable source.
The bulk of the world's cacao, and the least meaningful of the four names — it functions largely as a residual category meaning 'not Criollo'.
A hybrid population that arose in Trinidad from Criollo and Forastero material, and the practical compromise most fine chocolate is actually made from.
Ecuador's aromatic population, historically distinctive for a floral jasmine character, and largely displaced by disease and replanting in the twentieth century.
The single population behind most of the world's chocolate. Genetically narrow, agriculturally reliable, and almost never named on a wrapper.
A high-yielding, disease-resistant clone bred in Ecuador that has reshaped world planting — and the most genuinely contested variety in chocolate.
A trade designation, not a genetic group — and the distinction between it and Nacional is where most confusion about Ecuadorian cacao lives.
A pale-bean Criollo type from the Maracaibo basin, and one of the few cacao names that reliably indicates something specific about the beans.
A native Peruvian population from the Cusco region, grown in the same valleys for centuries and only recently described in genetic terms.
Regional hybrids and clonal selections
improved varieties, TSH, ICS, EET, hybrid cacaoMost cacao planted in the last fifty years is a bred hybrid or a numbered clone, and almost none of it appears on a wrapper. This is the material the four famous names are quietly displacing.