Chocolate Surprise! Caribbean Island: St. Lucia City: Soufriere March 17, 2000 by Wayne & Karen Brown

The Lamontagnes introduce us to their tour guide, Karen, who will tell us all about cocoa and what goes into your chocolate bar. The cocoa trees are gnarled and bushy, about 15-20 feet tall, with long, green and red-brown leaves. Hanging from the trees are large, ripe yellow and red cocoa pods. The pods look like wrinkled footballs and are about the size of Nerf footballs.

Karen breaks open a pod to show us the cocoa beans inside. The pod has thick, firm, soft skin. Inside the pod it looks like a bunch of guts! There are about 40 beans in the pod and they are covered with white slimy stuff. Karen gives us a cocoa bean to suck on. The beans are hard and slimy on the outside. The cocoa beans don't taste anything like chocolate. The slimy covering on the beans has a slight lemon taste.

Karen tells us the pods are picked and split open, and the cocoa beans are removed. The cocoa beans are put in a box, covered with banana leaves and left to ferment for six to eight days. The juice is collected and used to make cocoa vinegar. The beans are spread out on big drying racks and left to dry in the drying shed for two to three weeks.

Then the beans are sorted to remove imperfect beans, leaves or twigs. A perfect dried cocoa bean looks like a reddish-brown Milk Dud candy. There is still one more step before cocoa beans can be bagged, sent to chocolate factories and made into chocolate.

Karen took us to the cocoa dancing shed. The beans don't dance. Somebody dances on the beans! One of the workers dumped a box of beans into a huge metal pot and sprinkled them with water. He took off his big rubber boots, stepped into the metal pot and started stepping all over the beans - with his dirty feet! He is doing this to polish the beans so they are nice and shiny. Then the beans are bagged and shipped to Hershey's Chocolate factory! That's how you may have a part of St. Lucia in your lunch box.

Fond Doux Estate is a working plantation behind the Pitons. Fruits and vegetables, including bananas, coconuts, and cocoa are grown here. The plants in the front with big leaves are banana plants.

Karen points out the cocoa pods in a grove of cocoa trees.

Karen shows us what is inside the ripe cocoa pod. Gross! It looks like guts!

On the cocoa drying racks Karen works with Lyton and Karen sorting through and picking out the imperfect cocoa beans.

Karen holds the dried cocoa beans.

Worker "dances" on the dried cocoa beans with his bare feet to polish them.