How chocolate is made

Smooth chocolate is ground so fine that the particles drop below what your tongue can detect.

stations: 8
things upstream: 11
raw sources: 7
steps from the ground: 3

The short version

Chocolate starts as fermented, dried and roasted cocoa beans. The shelled nibs are ground into liquor, then blended with sugar, extra cocoa butter and, for milk chocolate, milk solids. A long churning step called conching makes the mix smooth and mellows its flavor. Careful heating and cooling, called tempering, sets the fat so the bar snaps cleanly.

Ferment and dry the beans

Beans and pulp are piled in bins where microbes work for up to seven days. The beans are then dried in the sun to stop mold, before being shipped to the factory.

up to 7 days

Goes in
Cocoa beans
Roast and shell them

The beans are cleaned, roasted and graded. Their shells come off and the pieces of kernel left behind are the nibs.
Mill the nibs to liquor

Grinding melts the fat in the nibs, so dry crumbs become a dark liquid paste called chocolate liquor. About 53% of that liquor is cocoa butter.
Blend the recipe

The liquor is mixed with sugar and extra cocoa butter. Milk chocolate also gets milk solids, and white chocolate replaces all the cocoa solids with milk solids. Refiners then crush the mix finer.

Goes in
Sugar Cocoa butter Powdered milk
Churn it for hours

In a conche, heated arms scrape and fling the paste against the walls so every particle is coated in fat. Air carries off sharp acids, and the process runs at about 49 °C for milk chocolate and up to 82 °C for dark. Lecithin from soybeans is added to adjust the flow.

under 12 hours for a modern multi-tonne batch

Goes in
Soybeans
Cycle the temperature

Tempering warms and cools the liquid chocolate so the cocoa butter crystallizes in only its most stable form, called Form V. Skipping this step leaves unstable crystals and a dull, crumbly bar that turns white with bloom.
Pour into bar molds

Tempered chocolate is deposited into molds, shaken to remove air bubbles and moved into cooling tunnels. It sets hard enough to be turned out intact.
Wrap and store cool

Bars are wrapped to keep out moisture and strong smells, because chocolate absorbs both. Warehouses hold them cool and dry in the dark until they ship.

15 to 17 °C

End of the lineChocolate Next it goes into candy-coated chocolate.

Worth repeating

Rodolphe Lindt invented the conche in Bern in 1879, and conched chocolate was so much smoother that it made mass-produced bars practical.
After conching, cocoa and sugar particles are typically around 20 μm, too small for the tongue to feel.
Ivory Coast and Ghana together contribute about 60% of the world's cocoa supply.
The cacao tree was used as a food source in what is now Ecuador at least 5,300 years ago.