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Nerve-racking tale of reviving wild cocoa to make amazing chocolate

Could cultivating wild cocoa help us produce great chocolate ethically? A stirring account reveals the problems of trying to transform an industry

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

8 January 2025

Hessian sack of cocoa beans are placed outside a warehouse on October 10, 2015 in Gagnoa, in southern Ivory Coast. Gagnoa is the chief collecting point for a forest region that sends coffee, cocoa, and timber. AFP PHOTO / ISSOUF SANOGO (Photo by Issouf SANOGO / AFP) (Photo by ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images)

Most chocolate comes from cocoa plants taken from Central America to Ghana and Ivory Coast

Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images


Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury Publishing)

I thought I knew the basics about the chocolate industry. Most comes from hundreds of thousands of small cocoa farms in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Many of these use child labour – a truth well hidden in the exquisite confections a lot of us are working our way through this January.

Rowan Jacobsen’s new book Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in search of cacao’s soul doesn’t tell this story in detail. Instead, Jacobsen, a science writer, spins a narrower tale…

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