Cacao beans are grown and harvested year-round, primarily from October through March. Frequent harvesting ensures that each cacao pod reaches optimal ripeness before being picked. Once harvested, the pods are opened so the beans can be removed. The beans are covered in a white pulp. The pulp has various flavor characteristics that change based on the variety of the bean - everything from tart, sweet, bright, floral but overall, extremely complex (and delicious!)

Once removed from their pods, farmers then must ferment the beans. Natural fermentation processes, break down bitter and astringent compounds developing complex flavors and colors. Different origins have different traditions and ferment in various ways; more often than not, you find box fermentation in Latin America whereby heap fermentation is more common in West Africa.

Finally, growers spread the beans out to dry naturally in the sun, sometimes using a rake to design traditional, carefully crafted drying patterns. Sun-drying enhances natural chocolate flavor and avoids pitfalls associated with other methods. Guittard chocolate is made almost exclusively of sun-dried beans.

You can only make good chocolate from good ingredients. Our Quality Control team receives pre-shipment samples of each of our raw materials, including cacao beans. Every ingredient is tested for flavor and quality to ensure it meets our strict specifications, guaranteeing that our end product consistently meets the desired flavor demands. 

Cacao beans are roasted in our Burlingame facility. Next, they’re winnowed and then slowly ground into fine particles until they become a dark, bitter liquid (chocolate liquor or cocoa mass).

Other ingredients, such as sugar, added cocoa butter and milk (in the case of milk chocolate) may be added at this stage. The resulting thick chocolate is taken from the mixer and refined further to an extremely smooth consistency.

Conching is the crucial next step in flavor development, where nuances and complexities are created in the chocolate. Guittard has over 150 years of custom chocolate-making and conching experience, and some of our conching formulas have been handed down over five generations.

Last, the chocolate is tempered to achieve perfect consistency and moulded or deposited into bars, wafers, and chips.