Cocoa did not start in Africa. It started in the Amazon
Every cocoa map today puts West Africa at the center, but the cacao tree itself is South American. Archaeologists working at the Santa Ana-La Florida site in Zamora-Chinchipe province, southeast Ecuador, found starch grains, theobromine residue, and fragments of ancient DNA specific to cacao in pottery left by the Mayo-Chinchipe culture, dating to roughly 3300 BC, about 5,300 years ago. That makes the upper Amazon, on the Ecuador-Peru border, the oldest known site of cacao use anywhere, published by Zarrillo and colleagues in Nature Ecology and Evolution in 2018. From there, domesticated cacao moved north along the Pacific coast and into Mesoamerica, where the Olmec and later the Maya turned it into a bitter, frothy drink centuries before Europeans had ever heard of it. Chocolate, in other words, is an Amazonian and Mesoamerican invention that West Africa only adopted a few hundred years ago, once European colonizers began planting it there for export.
Who actually grows cocoa today
According to the International Cocoa Organization's Quarterly Bulletin of Cocoa Statistics, Cote d'Ivoire alone grew about 38.2 percent of the world's cocoa beans in the 2024/25 season, more than the next three producers combined. Ghana followed at about 12.4 percent, then Ecuador at about 9.9 percent, Nigeria at about 7.2 percent, and Cameroon at about 6.6 percent. Together those five countries account for roughly three quarters of world cocoa production, and the first two alone, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, grow more than half of it. Both sit along the same humid forest belt of West Africa, and both run state marketing systems that fix the price paid to farmers each season rather than letting it float with the world market. See how many countries make up Africa for the wider continent this cocoa belt sits inside, and read more about why Africa was ever called the dark continent to understand how little the outside world once knew about the region now feeding its chocolate habit.
Growing cocoa and making chocolate are two different businesses
This is the fact the rank list alone cannot show. The countries that grow cocoa capture a small share of what chocolate is actually worth, because almost none of the value adding steps happen where the beans are grown. Grinding, refining, and manufacturing are concentrated in Europe: the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium between them process a large share of the world's cocoa beans into liquor, butter, and powder, while Switzerland and Belgium hold the branding and confectionery reputation that lets a bar sell for many times the price of the beans inside it. The United States is both a major grinder and the single largest chocolate consuming market. A farmer in Cote d'Ivoire sells raw beans for a fraction of a euro per bar's worth of cocoa; a supermarket in Zurich or Brussels sells the finished bar for several euros. The gap between those two numbers is manufacturing, branding, marketing, and retail margin, almost none of which stays in West Africa. Our supply chain tool shows this same growing versus earning split across a dozen other materials, from lithium to coffee.
From pod to bar, in order
- 1
Harvest, ferment, and dry: ripe pods are cut from the tree by hand, split open, and the beans are fermented in wooden boxes or under banana leaves for several days, then dried in the sun, mostly on small family farms in West Africa.
- 2
Export: dried beans are bagged and shipped, often through state marketing boards in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana that set the farmgate price before the season starts.
- 3
Grinding and pressing: beans are roasted and ground into cocoa liquor, then pressed apart into cocoa butter and cocoa powder, mostly in European ports and processing hubs.
- 4
Chocolate manufacturing: cocoa liquor, butter, sugar, and milk are combined, conched, and tempered into finished chocolate, largely by manufacturers based in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and the United States.
- 5
Retail: the finished bar is packaged, branded, and sold worldwide, usually thousands of kilometers from the farm that grew the beans inside it.
Why cocoa got so expensive, then partly cheaper again
Cocoa futures spent most of the 2010s and early 2020s trading in the low thousands of dollars a tonne. That changed through 2023 and 2024, as poor harvests in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, driven by disease, aging trees, and difficult weather, tightened supply faster than the market could adjust. According to trading data compiled by Trading Economics, ICE cocoa futures reached an all time high of about 12,900 dollars a tonne in December 2024, a level unheard of in the crop's history. Prices have since retreated substantially as supply concerns eased and inventories rebuilt: by mid September 2026 cocoa was trading at roughly 5,960 dollars a tonne, down close to 20 percent from a year earlier, still several times the pre spike price but well off the 2024 peak. That kind of swing is a direct consequence of how concentrated cocoa growing is: when two countries supply more than half the world's beans, one bad season in either of them moves the global price for everyone.
Farmers still see little of the money
The 2023 to 2024 price spike did not translate into rich cocoa farmers. Fairtrade International lists low farmer income as one of the sector's central, unresolved problems, and describes a living income for cocoa growing households in West Africa as a goal the industry is still working toward rather than one it has reached. Much of the price a shopper pays for a bar of chocolate is absorbed by processing, manufacturing, branding, and retail well outside the countries where the cocoa was grown. Farmgate prices set by Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana's marketing boards also move more slowly than the world price, so a spike on futures does not fully or immediately reach the farm.
Quick facts
| Country | Share of world cocoa production, 2024/25 |
|---|---|
| Cote d'Ivoire | ~38.2% |
| Ghana | ~12.4% |
| Ecuador | ~9.9% |
| Nigeria | ~7.2% |
| Cameroon | ~6.6% |
Figures from the International Cocoa Organization's Quarterly Bulletin of Cocoa Statistics, 2024/25 season. Cocoa was first domesticated in the upper Amazon, in present day Ecuador, about 5,300 years ago.