Cacao Chocolate
How long does it take for Cacao (Chocolate) plant to mature and produce pods?
It takes at least 3-4 years for the tree to mature and produce blossoms — and that requires very specific, consistent growing conditions in the subtropics.
In order for a tree to produce pods, you need several trees for cross-pollination. Cacao flowers are pollinated by a particular insect (a type of midge) and rarely, bats, whose habitat is naturally and exclusively the rain forest.
Pollination is very difficult to achieve outside of the rain forests where most of the world’s supply of chocolate pods are currently grown and harvested. Commercial cacao plantations that have been planted adjacent to rain forests have struggled to attract these insects from the forest and have largely failed to produce any significant amount of chocolate.
I suppose it would be theoretically possible, if you had two cacao trees in bloom, to cross pollinate them manually with laboratory implements, but it is a painstaking, meticulous process when done in the laboratory (or greenhouse) and any blossom that isn’t successfully pollinated dies within 24 hours.
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