Cacao (Theobroma cacao)

Theobroma cacao is a small evergreen tree of the mallow family (Malvaceae), six to twelve meters tall, native to the tropical rainforest of the Amazon basin. Its ovoid pods hold twenty to sixty seeds, cacao beans, embedded in white pulp, each bean roughly two fifths to half fat as cocoa butter; the beans are dried and fermented and then used to make chocolate liquor, cocoa powder, cocoa butter and chocolate. Archaeobotanical evidence from the Santa Ana-La Florida site in present-day southeastern Ecuador places its domestication at least 5,300 years ago, making equatorial South America, not Mesoamerica, the species' origin, though the crop reached and was independently used by Mesoamerican cultures long before European contact. The IUCN lists the wild species as Data Deficient: cultivated cacao is abundant across the tropics, but no adequate census of the ancestral wild populations in the Amazon exists.