it's not about the chocolate. How much chocolate did you eat today, or yesterday, or the day before?

Well, if you're a typical American, you ate about 9 pounds of chocolate in the last year.

Of course, if you're Swiss, it's about double that. But it's not about the chocolate.

Hey, it's Matt, and this is a special archived episode of a Kimbo.

You've been eating chocolate, but you might not know much about how it's made.

Here's how it happened. A tree, a cacao tree, has a pod on it. And inside that pod is some sweet,

sort of, sappy stuff, it's white. And inside that are some seeds called beans. And those cocoa

beans have to be fermented inside the pods in the sun, then dried out, then roasted,

shelled, ground up in a giant 3,000 pound granite thing called the melon jur,

then ground against each other for 30, 40, 60, 80 hours of conking. Then some sweetener is added,

often. Sometimes milk, but that makes it into a whole other product we're not going to get into.

Then it's tempered and made into bars. But all you know is that you've been eating chocolate.

A bunch of years ago, a guy named Sean Askenozy was having an epic midlife crisis.

He was a defense attorney in Missouri, a great one. He was the kind of person that drug dealers would

hire to get them off. And he usually won. He wasn't a stranger to murder scenes either.

But over the years, it took its toll. And one day, he just cracked.

Then he went to a monastery, the monastery where his dad had also served, looking for some insight,

some redemption for a way of being in the world. Shortly after that, Sean Askenozy started one of

the very first bean to bar chocolate makers in the United States. Now there are more than 200 of

them, but then in the early days there were fewer than it doesn't. Sean's job was to get the beans

and somehow figure out how to turn them into bars. But he decided to go further.

Instead of just buying sacks of beans from an importer, Sean decided to go directly to the farmers.

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