Cocoa harvesting is a fine art, as well as a science. You need the right timing, and the right experiences to recognize great cacao pods. Hence, eighty percent of cocoa pods are collected between October and March worldwide even though the plant itself flowers and produces fruit year-round.

There is a science, and method to harvesting the pods. You don’t want to damage them. When removing the fruits from the tree, care must be taken to avoid injuring the orchic-like flowers or the unripened seed pods. In both South America and Africa, long poles with an L-shaped knife tied to the end of the pole are used to remove the seed pods. The areas where the fruits are removed are then covered so that new flowers may appear.

Five or six months after fertilization, the fruits are mature. This is fairly easy to tell in the green varieties (which become yellow) and the red varieties (which become orange). However, with the purple pods, it is difficult to judge the degree of maturity. Maturity can also be judged by shaking the fruit; mature fruits make a distinctive sound. Over-ripe fruits do not fall from the tree, but they begin to germinate immediately when harvested.

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Harvests present grand variation in both quality and quantity worldwide. For this reason, manufacturers prefer to mix different strains of cocoa beans from different regions in order to obtain uniform results in their products.

Small plantations, such as the ones in Mexico, may produce between 200 and 700 kilos per hectare (2.47 acres). The largest plantations, such as those in Malaysia, produce up to 3 tons per hectare. Nevertheless, the cocoa beans grown in Mexico are among the most prized in the world for their exquisite flavor-and the most expensive.

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