The freshly harvested cocoa beans have an intense, sour-bitter taste. For this reason, some South American tribes initially harvested the cocoa fruit not for the seeds they contained, but for the sweet pulp surrounding them, and looked for a way to use the seeds as well. Over many centuries, the processing of cocoa beans has been perfected, to finally develop into a multi-stage method of obtaining the raw material from them that meets the intended expectations.
