Taiwan

Taiwanese cacao is a twenty-first-century crop, concentrated in Pingtung County in the south of the island with a northern outlier in Nantou. It emerged over the last fifteen years or so as a response to the unsustainable betel-nut industry that dominated Taiwan at the end of the last century, with growers replanting former betel-nut ground.

The defining feature of the origin is that growing and making are rarely separated: Chiu's CoCo planted in 2003 and harvested in 2006, and the makers who followed — Joyce, Cocosun, Fu Wan, Uncle A-Shin's Choco Farm, and TL Chocolates in Nantou — largely work tree-to-bar from their own or neighbouring farms.