How Chocolate is made | How Chocolate is produced?

How Chocolate is Produced

How chocolate is made – Everybody loves Chocolate, as it’s nutritious and has a lot of great properties for your health. It comes from a plant that is native to Central America. As they actually will take the beans off of the plant called the cocoa bean.

This cacao bean is used as a processing material. It comes in a variety of forms and is sold to businesses that manufacture products for retail sale.

It also supplies components such as cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Most of the cocoa beans come from West Africa, which grows seventy percent [70%] of the world’s crop.

• Where does chocolate come from?
• How chocolate is made from cocoa beans.

A conveyor belt moves through a cleaning system with a series of SIVs that screen out twigs stones and other debris. The next is the Micronizer revolving drums that heat the cocoa beans to loosen their shells.

Then comes the shell removing machine called a winnower inside successive rakes drag the beans, pulling across large pieces of shell.

A vacuum sucks away the remaining smaller pieces removing the shell exposes the inside of the cocoa bean called the nib. Then the factory will roast the nibs to develop their flavor.

Fifty-plus percent of the nib is fat which is cocoa butter to make chocolate. Then they will combine processed nibs cocoa butter and sugar along with milk powder if they are making milk chocolate.

Chocolate – Factory Processes

First, the factory processes the nibs by grinding them. The heat and friction activate the cocoa butter producing pure liquid chocolate called chocolate liqueur. Then the factory extracts some of the cocoa butter to sell it separately as a chocolate-making ingredient and to use for In-house production along with other ingredients in various proportions.

The recipe for unsweetened chocolate contains no sugar. The mixer blends the ingredients to the consistency of a very thick cake batter. The flavor is fine by this point but the coarse texture needs to be smoothed out.

So it moves to a refining machine passing between a set of five rollers. That five rollers reduce the particle size so much, that within just minutes the chocolate leaves the refiner as a fine dry powder. But now it needs to be re-liquefied.

The next step machine called a conch, friction, and heat. It reactivates the cocoa butter again and puts the powder back into liquid form. Then they add enough cocoa butter to reduce the viscosity to the exact thickness they need just a little bit.

Chocolate Chips

For making choco chips, the conch feeds a machine called a drop depositor. It deposits drops of choco onto a conveyor belt. The nozzle trays are interchangeable. Now the machine set up to produce various sizes of chips discs, or other types of shapes.

The choco chips still warm and soft enter a cooling tunnel traveling for about five minutes through several temperature zones. The temperature zones vary between 30 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. When the chips exit the tunnel, they are hard. Then a conveyor belt takes them through a metal detector, as a standard food safety precaution.

The factory also produces ten pounds format chocolate bars. A depositor fills bar-shaped plastic molds. The conveyor transfers them to an elevator system, which moves through a cold room for about 2 hours. These constant motions ensure optimal air circulation helping the cooling process.