This, of course, means that they are first shipped to various parts of the world where most chocolate candies come from. Europe and North America account for most of the chocolate production in the world. The Hershey Foods Corporation uses millions of pounds of cocoa beans annually. The first thing that commercial chocolate manufacturers do with cocoa beans is dry roast them. This develops the color and flavor of the beans to what our modern palates expect from chocolate.
Cocoa nibs consist of two important components, cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
The cocoa butter is essentially fat, and the cocoa solids are essentially coarse cocoa powder. Separating the two is critical in producing smooth, high quality chocolate candy. After all, you can't mix crumbled up cocoa beans with some sugar, press the mixture into a bar, and call it chocolate. There are two processes for getting the cocoa butter out of the cocoa solids. In the first, the cocoa nibs are converted into a non-alcoholic liquid called cocoa liquor.