Chocolate Has a Season Too!

We know when mango season is. We know when strawberries show up. We even know when our favourite coffee beans were roasted.

But chocolate?

Most of us don't think of it as something seasonal.

The cocoa in your hot chocolate, however, started its journey months before it reached your kitchen. And if it comes from India, there is a good chance that journey began somewhere in the south, under the shade of coconut and areca nut trees.

For Tiggle, that story takes us to Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, where our cocoa is sourced from a certified organic farm.

So let's follow a cocoa pod from the tree to your cup.

It starts with a pod

Cocoa doesn't grow in neat rows of trees made exclusively for chocolate. In places like Pollachi, cocoa is often grown alongside other crops, including coconut and areca nut.

The trees flower throughout the year, but the pods take around 140-160 days to mature. When they're ready, their colour changes - green pods turn yellow, while reddish pods can turn orange or yellow.

Farmers don't wait for the whole farm to ripen at once. Pods are picked roughly every 10–15 days, making cocoa harvesting a process of watching, waiting and knowing when each pod is ready.

In Tamil Nadu, the main cocoa harvest generally falls between September and January, with another smaller crop later in the year in June to July.

So when you hear that cocoa was harvested in 2025, you're not talking about one particular day.

You're talking about a season.

Then comes the part you never see

A freshly picked cocoa pod doesn't look much like chocolate.

Break one open and you'll find a cluster of pale, sticky beans surrounded by white pulp. These are collected and taken through one of the most important stages in the entire journey: fermentation.

The beans are placed in heaps, baskets or wooden boxes and left to ferment for several days. In the process, the temperature rises and the pulp breaks down. The beans change too - developing many of the flavour and aroma precursors that will eventually matter when they're turned into chocolate.

This is one of those wonderfully strange things about chocolate:

Some of the flavour you taste in your cup begins developing before the beans are even roasted.

After fermentation comes drying.

The beans are spread out and slowly dried, often under the sun, until their moisture is brought down to around 6-7%. They're then sorted and stored, ready for the next part of their journey.

From Pollachi to chocolate

This is where the story starts getting closer to the chocolate you know.

The dried cocoa beans are roasted. Roasting develops the aroma and deep chocolate character we associate with cocoa, while also making the beans easier to process.

At Tiggle, we dark-roast our cocoa beans to bring out a deeper chocolate flavour. The roasted cocoa then becomes part of the mix that eventually makes its way into your kitchen.

And this is something we care about at Tiggle: knowing where the cocoa comes from.

Our cocoa is sourced from a farm in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu - a region sitting at the foothills of the Western Ghats, where cocoa grows alongside crops like coconut and nutmeg. The surrounding Anamalai region has a long-standing cocoa-growing tradition, with farms using intercropping systems rather than treating cocoa as an isolated plantation crop.

Which means that the ingredient in your hot chocolate isn't just cocoa.

It has a place attached to it.

Pollachi.

Tamil Nadu.

A farm.

A harvest.

And then, finally, your cup

By the time you add Tiggle to warm milk, the cocoa has already travelled through months of growing, a carefully timed harvest, fermentation, drying and roasting.

All of that disappears rather beautifully into one very simple ritual:

Heat the milk.
Add the chocolate.
Stir.
Sip.

And suddenly, something that started as a pod hanging from a tree becomes the thick, chocolatey drink sitting in front of you.

So yes! chocolate has a season too.

And if you're drinking chocolate made with Indian cocoa, the story in your cup may have begun with a harvest from the same year, perhaps even the 2025 cocoa harvest.

We just don't usually get to see that part. Maybe that's worth remembering the next time you make hot chocolate. Because before there was a powder in your packet, there was a pod on a tree. And before there was chocolate, there was a harvest.