"Mars saw the potential this research holds to help accelerate what farmers have been doing since the beginning of time with traditional breeding, ultimately improving cocoa trees, yielding higher quality cocoa and increasing income for farmers," said Dr Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science for Mars.

"The genome is the road map."

"It's our responsibility to the farmers to do this work."

Results of the five year project will be freely available in the public domain through the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture.

As well as investing $10 million in a joint project with IBM to use supercomputers in the effort, Mars will also work closely with scientists from the US Agriculture Department (USAD).

"Once we have the whole genome, they'll be able to go in and look at all the genes they're interested in," said Ray Schnell, a geneticist at USAD's subtropical horticulture research station in Florida.

"They'll all be interested in flavour genes."

Participants in the project were keen to talk up the potential benefits of the project to Africa -- the continent produces around 70 percent of the world's cocoa.

"This collaboration is an opportunity for us to apply our computational biology and supercomputing expertise to help improve an economically important agricultural crop," said Dr Mark Dean, vice president of Technical Strategy and Global Operations at IBM Research.

"We look forward to helping the agricultural community in Africa, and in other emerging markets."