A healthy cacao tree can produce approximately 30 cocoa pods a year in average, and inside each pod typically there are 40 cocoa beans. It’s inevitable that there will be some losses at each stage so roughly 1 pound of chocolate needs 500 cocoa beans as raw materials. In a nutshell a whole year’s yield from one tree can make 2 pounds of chocolate.

Let's look at cocoa consumption again. Presumably not every cacao tree’s yield is the same as well as each pod’s size is different among species and geographic location, but this will give us an idea that the equation between cocoa beans and chocolate isn’t one to one.