24/01/2026
Most people know that coffee is made from coffee beans ☕️
Most people know that wine is made from grapes 🍷
Most people know that olive oil is made
from olives 🫒
So why almost nobody knows that chocolate is made from cacao beans?
Here are my guesses:
📺 Ads for chocolate rarely show the cacao beans/pods
We are used to fake chocolatiers staring at their bowls of chocolate for some weird reason, or tired women laying on the couch at the end of an exhausting day with chocolate in their hands. But nothing beyond the chocolate is shown. While wine commercials often include beautiful vineyards, people rarely get to see anything that resembles a cacao farm or a cacao fruit.
🛠 Chocolate is a highly-processed food
The steps to turn cacao beans into chocolate are many: roasting, crushing, winnowing, refining, conching, molding. The final product looks very different from the raw material, making it more difficult for consumers to get a sense of where chocolate comes from or how it is made.
🌎 Chocolate making is far removed from cacao growing
The places where most chocolate is consumed are thousands of miles away from the places where most cacao is grown. This distance isn’t only physical, but cognitive too. By never seeing the cacao fruits but only the finished products, the origins of chocolate remain a mystery for most consumers.
👀 Big chocolate brands never cared to show us
The historical chocolate brands that first mastered the art of chocolate advertisement never cared to educate consumers on where cacao came from. In their communication, flavor and packaging design were all that mattered.
2023 has seen the rising popularity of all the ways to bring consumers closer to the source of their favorite food:
🌴 Cacao tourism to spend time directly on the farms
🏭 Factory tours to understand the bean-to-bar process
🖼 Chocolate Museums for an educational and interactive experience
🏅 Cacao Ambassadors from origin giving talks around the world
🍫 Chocolate tastings as the perfect occasions to show cacao pods and beans
In your opinion, what can we do in 2024 to bring consumers closer to cacao?
