Processing
Between the bag and the bar there is a factory, and increasingly it is at origin. Processing — "grinding" — is the best proxy the market has for demand, and where it happens has changed more in the last decade than in the fifty before.
From bean to liquor
Beans are cleaned, roasted (which fixes the flavour begun in fermentation), cracked and winnowed to separate the shell from the nib, and the nibs ground to a paste: cocoa liquor, roughly 50–55% fat by weight. Liquor is the raw material for everything.
Liquor to butter and powder
Pressing liquor separates cocoa butter — the fat that gives chocolate its snap and melt — from press cake, which is pulverised into cocoa powder. The two products serve different markets and their prices move independently. Butter is a confectionery input; powder goes into beverages, baking and biscuits. The butter ratio and powder ratio — each product's price as a multiple of the bean price — are watched because they tell you which side of demand is tight. When butter is expensive and powder cheap, chocolate makers are the bottleneck; when powder leads, it is the beverage and industrial market.
Many processors alkalise ("Dutch") the nibs or cake to darken the powder and soften its acidity — a process invented in Amsterdam, which is not unrelated to why the Netherlands grinds more cocoa than any country that grows it.
Grindings as the demand statistic
Nobody publishes chocolate consumption in real time. What is published is how much cocoa the processors ground, quarterly, by region: the European Cocoa Association, the Cocoa Association of Asia and the National Confectioners Association each report about two weeks after quarter-end. Together they cover most of the world's grind. The figures are volumes, not values, and they are input to processing, not sales of chocolate — a distinction that matters when processors are running down or building stocks.
Where the grind is moving
The old pattern was beans out, products in: West Africa exported raw beans and Europe processed them. That is changing. Côte d'Ivoire now grinds close to half its crop domestically and has passed the Netherlands as the largest processor in the world; Ghana's capacity is smaller but growing; Indonesia and Malaysia grind more than they grow. Origin processing is encouraged by export duty structures that favour semi-finished products, and the result is that "grindings by region" now measures where the factories are, not where the chocolate is eaten. Rising origin grind alongside falling European grind can mean demand relocating rather than shrinking.
Who does it
Processing is concentrated. A handful of firms — Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Olam Food Ingredients, Blommer, Guan Chong — account for the majority of world grind, operate at origin and in consuming countries, and are also the largest bean buyers and exporters. The same companies therefore appear at three or four points on the chain, which is worth remembering when reading any statistic that treats "exporters", "processors" and "traders" as separate groups.