If you have ever had chocolate before then you have tried cacao. Cacao is the flavor in chocolate and what makes it a brown color. It comes from the cacao plant, which produces fruit with beans inside. The process is long but very interesting. In Minca, Colombia you can visit an organic cacao farm called La candelaria. At La candelaria you will learn about how cacao is grown and produced.
BACKGROUND ON CACAO
There are three kinds of cacao: Creole, which is the sweetest, Forester, which comes from Africa, and Trinitarian, which is a combination of Creole and Forester.
Cacao is originally from the Americas and is over 500,000 years old. The plant produces fruit all year long.
In the entire world, The Ivory Coast, an African country, produces the most cacao followed by Indonesia and Brazil. Germany consumes the most cacao per capita followed by Switzerland and France.
THE PROCESS OF PRODUCING CACAO
Since the cacao plant is always producing fruit, cacao farmers are harvesting the fruit all year long. They know when the fruit is ready due to the change in color of the fruit. The creole cacao goes from red to yellow and the Forester cacao goes from purple to orange.
The Creole cacao plant is the most common cacao plant grown in Colombia. When the fruit is rip it is harvested and cut open. Inside the cacao fruit are beans and a white fleshy fruit. The fruit tastes similar to lychee.
The inside of the fruit is taken out and then fermented. Then the fleshy fruit that covers the bean is fermented.The next step of the process is to roast and peel the cacao beans and then crush them into a thick paste. Lastly, the cacao paste is frozen, packaged and sold accordingly.
This is how small companies make and sell cacao. However if a large company from Germany wants to buy a large amount of Cacao they order the beans. Then once the beans arrive the German country has their own process of roasting and crushing the beans. This creates the variety we see in chocolate around the world.
LA CANDELARIA
La candelaria is a small organic cacao and coffee farm that is located around 45 minutes walking from Minca. Minca is a small Colombian town in the Northern Part of Colombia.
La candelaria is an ethically sustainable cacao farm. They work hard to limit the waste they create and are entirely organic. This means that they do not use any pesticides. To protect their plants from other animals they plant fruit trees around the cacao plants to distract the animals.
La candelaria runs cacao tours everyday all day. The tour lasts around 1-1.5 hours and costs 25.000 mil. You don’t need to book the tour ahead of time. Simply show up and ask for the next cacao tour.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Overall, when visiting Minca make sure to add La candelaria’s cacao tour to your list of things to do and see. It is a great experience, the money goes to a good cause and you get to taste delicious cacao.
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