It is February 14, which is Valentine’s Day. If you're lucky, you might be in line for a chocolate or two.
If chocolate is a romantic gesture, and chocolate sales are any indication of the 'romantic' status of a country, South Africans aren't doing too badly.
Africa, the leading cocoa producer
But first, let’s get a bit of background on who are the producers of chocolate. Let's talk about the production of cocoa, the central ingredient of chocolate.
Africa is the leading producer of cocoa, particularly in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria.
Trailing Africa is South America and Southeast Asia, as illustrated in Exhibit 1 below.
Now that we know the cocoa producers, one might assume that these countries will also be the leading producers of chocolate – wrong!
The United States, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Argentina are the leading producers of chocolate (see the table below).
While Africa is a leading producer of cocoa, there isn’t a single cocoa producer featured among the top chocolate producers.