Cocoa Bean

The harvesting period can be anywhere from three weeks to three months. When the fruit is ripe, it is almost always handpicked, using either selective picking, where only the ripe fruit is removed or strip-picking, where all of the fruit is removed from a branch all at once. Because a tree can have both ripe and unripe berries at the same time, one area of crop has to be picked several times, making harvesting the most labor intensive process of coffee bean production.