Where does chocolate grow, and why only near the equator?

Chocolate grows on a small evergreen tree called cacao, and it is a fussy one. It lives in hot, rainy tropical places within about 20 degrees of latitude of the Equator, and in the wild it grows as an understory plant, tucked in the shade beneath taller trees in humid forest. Cold is its enemy: in the central lands of the Aztecs frost stopped cacao trees from growing, so the Aztecs had to import it.

The part we eat hides in a pod. A ripe pod weighs about 500 grams and holds 20 to 60 seeds, called beans, packed in a white pulp that tastes like lychee or tropical melon. Oddly, unlike the fruit of most trees, the pod does not grow at the end of a branch. Like a jackfruit, it sprouts straight out of the trunk or a thick branch. Once the seeds are dried and fermented, they are the cocoa beans that chocolate is made from.

The tree is a slow and wasteful worker. It begins to bear when it is four or five years old, and a mature tree may produce 6,000 flowers in a year and only about 20 pods. Its flowers are pollinated by tiny flies called biting midges. About 1,200 seeds, roughly 40 pods, are needed to make a single kilogram of cocoa paste.

Cacao's story starts in the Americas. It was first domesticated at least 5,300 years ago in what is now southeast Ecuador, then carried north to Mesoamerica. Today the biggest producer is Ivory Coast, which grew 42.5 percent of the world's 5.6 million tonnes in 2023. The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus named the tree Theobroma in 1753, Greek for food of the gods.