In honor of Valentine's Day, for the next two weeks ahead of Feb. 14, Lost Recipes is going to pay tribute to this beloved ...

and cocoa is used to describe the powder made from ground cacao beans. Cacao beans are actually seeds taken from pod-like ...

Ivory Coast expects to record one of the worst mid-crop cocoa harvests of the last 15 years this season with production seen ...

One study published in the journal Nature Food looks at the potential for using not just cocoa beans, but the cacao pod as a whole. "Surrounding the beans is the pulp, which yields a very sweet ...

The cacao trees mature at five years and begin to flower on the trunk. The flowers are pollinated by midges, a small fly.

Chocolate is made by roasting and grinding up cocoa beans to yield chocolate 'liquor ... the bits of the chocolate that are from the cocoa pod rather than the later additives such as sugar ...

Farmers told Reuters that as flowers and cherelles, which develop into cocoa pods, were proliferating on trees more moisture was needed to help them survive and turn into bean-producing pods.

The beans are then removed from the pods with their surrounding pulp. Workers fill sacks with cocoa beans in Kahin village at the edge of the Scio forest reserve in Duekoue, Ivory Coast.