The first recorded cocoa to reach Asia was brought to the Philippines from Acapulco, Mexico, in the second half of the 17th century. The plant crossed the Pacific aboard the Manila-Acapulco galleons, ships that connected the Philippines and Mexico when both were under Spanish rule. The route operated from 1565 to 1815 and became one of the pathways through which plants from the Americas reached Asia.
More than three and a half centuries later, the Philippines had around 32,240 hectares of cocoa plantations in the first half of 2023. Yet the country does not appear as a separate producer in the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) production table.
Indonesia, meanwhile, grew into one of the world's major cocoa producers. FAOSTAT data for 2023 puts Indonesia in third place, accounting for around 13 percent of global cocoa supply. So how did this happen?
From Acapulco to the Philippines
Records place the arrival of cocoa in the Philippines sometime between 1660 and 1670. Choco-Story dates its introduction to this period, while Chocolate Atlas lists 1663 and 1666 among the years cited in historical sources.
The clearest date is 1670. That year, a record mentions a single cocoa plant being shipped from the port of Acapulco to the Philippines.
Other records offer clues about what happened after the plant arrived. In the chronicle of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín, Pedro Bravo is said to have sent cocoa to Fr. Bartolomé Bravo in Camarines, Luzon. The plant was identified as Criollo, a cocoa variety native to Mesoamerica and among the earliest types to be cultivated.
From Luzon, cocoa cultivation later spread to other parts of the Philippines. Today, its main production center is in Mindanao, particularly Davao. In 2023, Davao produced 8,024.02 tonnes out of a national total of around 10,759 tonnes.
How Did Cocoa Reach Indonesia?
The early history of cocoa in Indonesia is less clear than in the Philippines. One commonly cited date is 1560, when cocoa was said to have been brought by the Spanish to Minahasa, North Sulawesi.
If true, this would mean cocoa had reached Indonesia more than a century before the earliest recorded arrival in the Philippines. However, supporting evidence is difficult to find. Choco-Story notes that Rumphius, who documented the flora of Maluku and Minahasa in Herbarium Amboinense, did not mention cocoa.
The first record mentioning cocoa trees in Indonesia dates to 1778. It was linked to a reward offered to the first person who successfully planted at least 50 cocoa trees.
Large-scale cultivation later developed in Minahasa in 1822. Europeans and Chinese settlers were among the first to grow the crop, followed by local farmers. By around 1830, cocoa exports from the region had reached 50 tonnes a year.
The Minahasa plantations were later damaged by attacks from Helopeltis and cocoa pod borers. Cocoa cultivation in the region was eventually abandoned.
Why Did Indonesia Grow Where the Philippines Declined?
The two countries eventually took very different paths. In the Philippines, cocoa production reached around 35,000 tonnes in 1990 before declining. The Philippine Department of Agriculture's 2016 cocoa industry roadmap attributed the decline to weather, pests and diseases, ageing trees, falling world prices, and competition from plantation crops such as bananas and oil palm.
By 2015, the Philippine Statistics Authority recorded 13,910 hectares producing 6,020 tonnes of cocoa. Local chocolate grinding capacity, meanwhile, required around 40,000 tonnes, far above the country's roughly 10,000-tonne domestic production.
Indonesia was moving in the opposite direction. In 1980, Indonesia had only around 19,000 hectares of cocoa plantations and produced 10,000 tonnes. Over the next three decades, the scale changed dramatically.
Production reached around 844,000 tonnes in 2010, while the planted area continued to expand, peaking at 1.85 million hectares in 2012.
A 1997 study in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies linked this expansion to several factors, including suitable land, low production costs, competitive marketing with limited government intervention, relatively good transport infrastructure, supportive macroeconomic policies, and farmers' entrepreneurship.
Migration also played a role. An ethnographic study in East Kolaka published in 2019 described how Bugis migrants from South Sulawesi brought rice-farming practices to new areas before developing cocoa cultivation there.
Together, these conditions allowed smallholder cocoa farming to spread rapidly across Sulawesi, giving Indonesia the production scale that the Philippines struggled to maintain.
The crop that first crossed the Pacific to the Philippines eventually followed a very different path in Indonesia. After an early foothold in Minahasa in the 19th century, the rapid expansion of smallholder plantations in Sulawesi from the 1980s transformed cocoa into one of Indonesia's major agricultural commodities and helped make the country a leading producer worldwide.
