Guests on the A Slice of Brooklyn tour hop on a bus. They are about to visit fancy chocolate producers around New York City. Here are some flavors they might try in their travels: chocolate with pink sea salt, chocolate with chai spices, and chocolate with super-hot ghost peppers. Yum! But the tourists want more than a satisfied sweet tooth. They want answers! Where does that chocolatey goodness really come from, anyway? (Hint: It isn’t a cow that gives chocolate milk.)

These tourists are part of a bigger trend. More and more, people care about what they put in their mouths. They want to know: Where does my food come from? How was it made? Most people know a little about fine foods like wine and cheese. But here’s something people rarely know: Chocolate, another fine food, comes from the beans of the cacao tree. Like with wine and cheese, the way cacao beans are prepared determines the quality of the chocolate.

Here’s how chocolate-making starts. Chocolatiers receive dried beans from far away cacao farms. They roast and skin the beans. What’s left is called a nib. Nibs get ground into paste. Chocolate makers use different recipes—ingredients, length of roasting time, and type of bean—for the paste. Then, to make high quality chocolate, they take another step. They put the paste into a conche machine. It scrapes and mixes the chocolate—sometimes for as long as 78 hours. The longer the better!

Guests on the Brooklyn tour get a sneak peek into that process. And they’re not the only ones. Hershey’s Chocolate World in Pennsylvania has hosted more than 100 million guests. The free tour there takes guests on rides. They learn the history of chocolate and how it is made. They get a treat at the end and even meet some (pretend) singing cows. Tours at other factories, like Taza in Massachusetts, show how artisanal chocolate is made. Taza chocolatiers grind cacao beans the old-fashioned way. They use granite stones.

By the end of the Brooklyn tour, the curious chocoholics have seen the whole chocolate-making process—from bean to packaged bar. They’ve gotten some good views of New York while they were at it. That’s a wrap! Back on the bus!