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by Rowan Jacobsen Video/Images: Alyssa D'Adamo of the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund The Lacandon rainforest is a nearly impenetrable mass of mountains and jungle on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. It’s resisted most efforts to tame it so far. The first settlers didn’t arrive until the 1970s, and they didn’t get far. It’s still full of wildlife, a couple of uncontacted indigenous groups, and other people who would prefer that you didn’t contact them, thank you very much.
They knew the trees were a relic Criollo variety, dating back to ancient Mayan times, untainted by modern cacao introductions, so they named it “Sac Balam,” or “white jaguar,” after a famous settlement in the forest founded in 1586 by Lacandon Maya who refused to submit to the Spanish invaders. The Maya retreated to the jungle, built a community of about 100 houses, and lived off the land until 1695, when the Spanish finally forced them to integrate. Archaeologists have searched for the remains of Sac Balam for years, to no avail. And the collecting expedition didn’t have much better luck with this ancient cacao. They germinated a number of seeds back at their research station in Soconusco, but they all died.
Still, for years, Alexander has wanted to revisit the jungle to get new samples, and this HCP expedition finally gave him an opportunity. Permissions to cross the area were obtained from the local community. That’s important in this rough part of Chiapas, one of many in the state under the control of the Zapatistas, the Marxist group that took over a big chunk of Chiapas in 1994, calling for land reforms and greater rights for indigenous groups. Although the Army drove them out of the main cities, they still control much of the Chiapan countryside, and they have morphed into a legit political party with tremendous popular support. We were in core Zapatista territory, and they were excellent hosts. It seemed like smooth sailing. Still, you could feel the tensions simmering across Chiapas. Just hours after we’d left San Cristobal that morning, a local business leader had been gunned down, and in response there had been shooting and fires across San Cristobal and other towns as rival drug gangs settled scores. The whole state was a tinderbox. A lot of the narcotafficking takes advantage of the remote jungles where we were. So even though the community felt idyllic—clear streams, children playing, hillsides covered in cacao and maize—as strangers, we were at the mercy of our hosts.
But a little further down the road, our truck came to a halt by a small house for an emergency strategy session with some locals who knew what lay ahead. It seemed that the deeper part of the jungle where the cacao lay had recently been taken over by narcotraffickers who were farming poppies for heroin production. Everyone had hoped that they would be in a different part of the territory today, but unfortunately they were right where we needed to go. And if they saw strangers with cameras, it wouldn’t be good. Under the circumstances, it seemed too dangerous to continue. Reluctantly, we turned back. Alexander was crushed. His quest to bring the Lacandon’s wild cacao genes back into the fold of Mexican cacao production was yet another victim of the global instabilities racking Latin America. But there was a silver lining. When a trail guide at our lodge overheard us talking about wild cacao, he perked up. “There’s a tree here, up the trail,” he said. “Do you want to see it?” Well, yes, we did. He led us up the trail into a Jurassic Park of thundering waterfalls and dripping limestone caves. Bats flitted in and out. At the base of a giant cliff, he stopped and pointed to a tree. “Cacao,” he said.
Alexander has a strong belief that everything happens for a reason, and he felt like it was in the plan for us to find these two trees all along. As we wound our way out of the valley, headed for Soconusco—the land where Criollo was born, and where Alexander has been working for years with some of Mexico’s best cacao farmers in less volatile settings—it felt like the world of heirloom cacao was a tiny sailboat riding a storm of global forces. Perhaps the founders of Sac Balam had the right idea all along.
by Rowan Jacobsen Images & Video: Alyssa D'Adamo of the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund Greetings from La Chontalpa, the cocoa-coated lowlands near Tabasco’s Caribbean coast, where it’s 99 in the shade, 105 in the sun, and getting into a car is like stepping into a microwave. Actually, two of our vehicles have already expired under the thermal assault. All worth it, because this is the biggest cache of cacao in Mexico. The state of Tabasco is kind of like the Louisiana of Mexico: A hot, steamy swamp on the Gulf of Mexico steeped in strong local traditions, and catapulted out of poverty in the late 20th century by a sudden infusion of wealth from the oil industry. In Louisiana, it’s the seafood industry that exists awkwardly side-by-side with the oil industry. In Tabasco, it’s cacao. Cacao goes all the way back in Tabasco. When the Spanish annexed Tenochtitlán in 1521 and pulled the rope on the supply chains to see where the Aztecs were tapping the gushers of cacao beans flowing into the city, it led to two places: Soconusco and “La Chontalpa."  Soconusco was more famous at the time, but today Tabasco dominates. A few years ago, The Chocolate Life’s Clay Gordon estimated that Tabasco produced 18,000 tons of cacao per year, Chiapas 4,500 tons. Today, HCP’s cacao-wrangler in Mexico, Alejandro Escriche, guesses that Tabasco supplies two-thirds of Mexico’s production, Chiapas the other third. (With Oaxaca kicking in a rounding-error’s worth of strange strains, all consumed locally.) For centuries, the cacao in Tabasco was a mix of varieties descended from ancient times. Grafting was unknown. Everyone planted seeds from their favorite trees, every tree was different, the trees cross-pollinated, and a distinctive range of landraces took hold in the Chontalpa. Although Chontalpa cacao had a terrible year in 2023, thanks to a double-whammy of monilia infection and wacky weather, Alejandro will be collecting several different samples of classic Chontalpa field blends for heirloom consideration.
But that’s not our main story today. That involves another cacaotero, as they’re called here, named Carlos Echeverria. As you’d expect from a cacao region that predates the Conquest, La Chontalpa was traditionally a mix of Criollo strains, many of which produced white beans with low bitterness and buttery flavors. Such beans are known as almendra blanca, and they have been prized for centuries. In the 1940s, Carlos Echeverria inherited an abandoned farm scattered with overgrown cacao trees. Many were forms of almendra blanca. Carlos began experimenting, selecting his favorites for propagation, searching for the perfect combination of flavor and vigor, and also doing something unheard of in Tabasco: grafting the trees onto better rootstock to improve their yield. Eventually, he landed on a tree that knocked it out of the park on both flavor and productivity and began cloning it, the first true white-beaned varietal. He named it Carmelo.  Abandoned La Jolla Ranch
And prices exploded. $10 a pound for Carmelo beans. Then $20. A kind of tulip mania took hold. Everyone in the region wanted to plant Carmelo trees and get in on the game. Clara spread the wealth, selling trees as well as beans, and La Chontalpa hitched its wagon to Carmelo. And then it all came crashing down. The other farmers in Tabasco weren’t used to working with grafted varieties, which need more TLC than trees planted from seed (pie franco in the local parlance, a term borrowed from the wine industry that means “free feet”). Worse, their Carmelo didn’t taste like Finca La Joya’s. This would not have surprised anyone in the wine business. It wasn’t just the genetics of the trees. It was the terroir of the place. It was the soil, the landscape, Clara’s management and fermentation skills. It was also supply and demand. Soon, there was a glut of Carmelo on the market, most of it not very good. The bubble burst. Prices tanked. And when monilia hit Tabasco like a hurricane in 2005, the Carmelo craze came crashing down. The good times didn’t even last at Finca La Joya. Clara died in 2013, the family squabbled over the ranch, and a few years ago Rancho La Joya was abandoned. We stood outside its locked gate and flew a drone over the overgrown ruins, a source of profound heartache to Clara’s daughter, Rossanna Hernandez Echeverria, who lives a kilometer away and has started her own young orchard of almendra blanca to continue her mother’s legacy.
 Finca Las Delias It’s still a work in progress, but things are looking promising. Yields have bounced from 1.2 tons in 2019 to just half that in 2020 and 2021, before bouncing back to well over a ton in 2022 and another good year in 2023, as Alma got her farm management dialed in. Fermentation, too. “When I started,” Alma says, “I couldn't make any connection between what was a good smell in the beans and what was a bad one. For me, everything was bad, because it smelled like vinegar!” But after tasting enough of the chocolate, she began using a lighter hand with fermentation, which suits such gentle beans, and today her beans have brought Carmelo’s reputation right back to its 1990s peak. They command some of the highest prices in the world, and they are snapped up by Mexico’s handful of bean-to-bar chocolate makers.
That’s the unexpected takeaway from Tabasco as we hop another series of buses and trucks for the Lacandon Jungle, the most pristine and remote rainforest in North America, where we hope to get insights into the earliest communities to cultivate cacao in North America—and maybe even get a few glimpses of the feral descendants of those efforts. Wish us luck, and please send more mosquito repellant if you can.  Alma and her parents written by Rowan Jacobsen Meet Dionisia Garcia Juárez, a Chinantec woman who lives in the town of San Felipe de Léon, tucked deep into a fold of the Chinantla, a vertiginous corner of northeastern Oaxaca. She’s a spry 55, still climbing the steep paths of her farmstead in a traditional huipil, the woven tunic of the peoples of southern Mexico that captures the history and beliefs of her ancestors in embroidered symbols. The Chinantec people have lived here since forever, and they’ve cultivated cacao approximately that long. They self-governed for centuries until the Aztecs rolled into town around 1455, happily allied with the Spaniards in the 1520s to boot their oppressors, and then of course wound up rebelling against the Spanish a decade later.  The valleys and slopes of the Chinantla are so steep that the Chinantec developed a unique language that includes a variety of sharp whistles that can be used to convey complex information from one ridge to another. The language has been studied extensively by anthropologists, and there are still about 100,000 Chinantec speakers, but it’s mostly just the old people these days who know how to make and interpret the whistles. The kids use cell phones. San Felipe de Léon has just enough altitude to exist in that rare band where both coffee and cacao can thrive. Any lower and its too hot for good coffee; any higher is too cool for cacao. The people of San Felipe de Léon grow both in a delicate dance. The coffee is new, but the cacao is a constant. “When I was a kid,” says Dionisia, “these mountains were covered in cacao. We just treated it like any other fruit.” They used it in their drinks, especially atole and pozol, and sold anything extra to coyotes—middlemen who are like traveling pawn shops, rolling into town with a truck and a roll of cash and buying anything farmers are desperate to sell at extremely low prices. Coyotes are always a last resort, but if you’re a farmer without the means to haul your cacao to a distant city where you might get a better price, they can be better than nothing.
But to earn the higher price paid by both domestic and international bean-to-bar customers, good fermentation is essential, and that’s the next step. Alejandro Zamorano, HCP’s lead on this project, is kick-starting the first fermentation fenter in San Felipe De Leon, with support from HCP. Soon quality Chinantla cacao will be finding its way into craft chocolate for the first time.
Alejandro surveyed the trees with barely contained fervor. “Look at the pale color of the new leaves!” he shouted, snapping photos. “You can tell it’s white-beaned.” The genetic mutation that drained the color from Criollo beans did the same to its leaves. These trees were the real deal, a living chunk of Oaxacan history. And there was another important piece of Oaxacan history and culture growing all over those hillsides, mixed in with the cacao and coffee: pataxte, aka Theobroma bicolor, or white cacao. Pataxte is cacao’s less flashy sibling, and it has always played a supporting role in Oaxaca’s traditional beverage culture. Its white beans have less fat than cacao, a milder taste, and they are exceptionally good at producing a froth
Now pataxte is having a moment. Next-gen Oaxacan eateries are featuring it more prominently. Leading the way is Olga Cabrera’s remarkable Tierra del Sol, which uses it in a sublime white mole, as well as in a veriety of mixed-cacao drinks and pastries. A trickle of pataxte is even making its way to the wider world through exporters like Alejandro, who pays Dionisia $16 a kilo for all the pataxte she can get her hands on. (He buys her cacao and coffee, too.) That makes it more expensive than virtually any cacao in the world, but it’s necessary to cover the meager yields and difficulty separating the beans from the pods. Alejandro had never seen a whole hillside of his newest obsession before, and he gaxed around in astonishment. Most of the pataxte in the world is coming from this one valley. Dionisia handed us small white disks of pure pataxte chocolate to try, containing nothing but pataxte and sugar. It was rich, creamy, mild, and nutty, like peanut-butter fudge. It didn’t taste remotely like chocolate, but we could immediately comprehend why people have been mixing the two together for centuries. They are natural partners. Dionisia likes to mix 1/4 pataxte into her drinking chocolate, along with sugar and a touch of cinnamon.
by Rowan Jacobsen
Photos © Alyssa D'Adamo of the HCP 
We’ve been thinking a lot about foam these past couple of days in Oaxaca. That, of course, puts us firmly in line with a practice that goes back millennia in Mesoamerica. Long before the Viennese began ladling whipped cream onto their “Kapuziner” coffees (1700s) or the Italians began using their new espresso machines to steam some milk (1900s), Mesoamerican cultures were paying a lot of attention to the foam that topped their chocolate drinks.
They went to great lengths to produce it. They would pour the chocolate from on high, one vessel to another, back and forth, raising a froth that both the Maya and Aztec singled out as the best part of the drink. They even designed vessels with special spouts designed not for pouring but for channeling breath into the drink to give it a foamy head. (Hat tip to Rich Tango-Lowy for that insight.) This has always seemed charming, but maybe just a little bit…bourgie? One minute, you’re smashing your neighbors’ skulls with obsidian-edged warclubs, and the next you’re working on your barista skills? But of course, there was way more to it than that, and we’ve been getting some insights into that here in Oaxaca—insights that help to shine a light onto heirloom cacao’s outsized importance. Oaxaca is definitely the place to think about this stuff. When it comes to foamy drinks, the place makes Rome look downright…flat. In every marketplace, you find women making the traditional drinks of their regions. Many include chocolate, and most of them come topped with a big cloud. 
You find these drinks in every town of Oaxaca, says Shava Cueva, the creator of Beverages of Oaxaca, a photographic odyssey documenting these drinks and the women who make them. The recipes change from town to town, family to family, as they are passed down through the generations. Some are only made on special occasions—weddings, festivals, funerals. Some are only made once a year and involve wild ingredients that are really hard to find. All are hard to prepare. And that turns out to be important.
The perfect example of this is the chocolate atole made by Carina Santiago, a Zapotec women who lives in Teotitlán del Valle, a town in the countryside outside Oaxaca City that’s famous for its weaving. Carina’s drink requires many ingredients and takes two hours to make. It’s a variation on others in Teotitlán, but it’s her own family’s take on chocolate atole. She learned the recipe from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and so on. She frames this in a particular way: “It’s been passed down for generations from women I love.” To start, Carina toasts cacao, wheat, her neighbor’s yellow maize, and cinnamon on a comal over a fire, one ingredient at a time, stirring with her hand and a straw brush to get just the right amount of toastiness, the smell slowly filling the room. The corners of the corn blacken. A few of them pop off the comal.
Oaxaca is the epicenter of Mexican cacao consumption. The state pounds an extraordinary amount of cacao each day, a river of drinking chocolate and mole negro pouring into the mouths of locals and tourists alike, but almost all of it is low-quality lavado, bulk cacao washed before fermentation. Locals actually prefer the harsh astringency and bitterness to balance the intense sweetness of the drinks, but Carina uses just a touch of honey in her atole and insists on an heirloom Criollo from Chiapas for its buttery richness. It makes her drink costly as well as time-consuming. Special.
By the time the maize comes off the comal, the cacao has cooled enough to peel by hand. We pitch in. Part of the deal is the pitch-in. The peeled cacao is black, shiny, polished like mahogany, completely unlike cacao roasted in an oven. Baskets of each ingredient are placed around a metate, the curved grinding stones used by women throughout Mesoamerica for thousands of years. Carina has some she inherited from her grandmother. She kneels behind the metate on a woven pad and bears down, grinding each ingredient to powder with her stone roller. It’s all slow, meditative, the toasting and sweeping and grinding, a kind of Zen incantation. To the toasted ingredients, she adds others like cinnamon, brown sugar, and pataxte (Theobroma bicolor, the real “white cacao”; more on that soon). The pataxte, which looks like white cacao beans, is buried underground for nine months by her daughter-in-law, and watered periodically so it ferments. That’s key to produce white cacao’s special trick: it’s a foaming agent par excellence. Some ingredients, like cinnamon, grind easy; others, especially the corn, make even Carina break out in a sweat as she bears down on the fat heirloom grains. At a fiesta, says Carina, there will be twenty metates going at once, all the village women leaning in with their ripped forearms. The cacao goes on the metate last, because, unlike the other ingredients, it doesn’t grind down into powder, but rather a rich paste, to which all the other ingredients are added, and everything is ground some more until you are left with a thick mole of sorts. 
This goes into a gourd-shaped pot with hot water, and then the hard work continues. Out comes the molinillo, the stick used to raise the froth. Carina spins it furiously between her palms, back and forth, droplets spattering the sides of the pot, for a good ten minutes, until it looks like cocoa-colored whipped cream.
She pours corn atole into a ceramic bowl and ladles the foam on top until it’s splashing over the sides like a chocolate jacuzzi. She holds it up to us with a smile. It’s delicious, of course, deep with the roasty notes of the corn and cacao, but that’s almost beside the point. The point is the gift. Here, I made this hard thing for you. “You have to put love into it,” she says. “When you taste it, you taste the flavor, but you also taste the love.”
And the foam is the best part, just like the Maya and Aztecs explained to the Spanish. As we dip our faces into the cloud and lick our frothy mustaches, we savor the creamy chocolate, and the symbolism as well. Carina has poured herself into this offering, elevating it with her effort from a simple drink into an airy offering, a bit of spirit caught in suspension for a brief moment in time. Drink it fast. The bubbles are already popping, the spirit returning to earth. Accept the gift.
Since our visit to Carina, I keep thinking about those old Mayan pots with the blowing spouts, how they captured the maker’s breath in a thousand bubbles, an infusion of air, maybe from someone you love. Of course the foam was the best part. And of course chocolate was the conduit. Handmade chocolate is always hard, a shapechanger with a knack for capturing the imprints of its maker and passing them along. Here, I made this for you. Or so it seems, this toasty night in Oaxaca. We’ll learn more as we visit cacao farmers in Tabasco and Chiapas in the coming days and learn a bit more about their lives. Abrazos from the road.
by Rowan Jacobsen
Images by Alyssa D'Adamo of the HCP 
Hello, heirloom cacao lovers! Greetings from Mexico City. HCP is here with Alejandro Zamorano Escriche, the founder of Revival Cacao, in search of lost, overlooked, underappreciated, or simply impossible-to-get-your-hands-on cacao varietals that might make good candidates for future heirloom designation. It’s part of HCP’s mission to Discover, Identify, and Preserve new heirloom cacaos. While the Identify and Preserve pieces of the mission have been happening for years, everything is finally in place to proactively Discover heirloom cacaos not yet on anyone’s radar and work with the producers to usher them into the world of fine cacao, and we couldn’t be more excited. First up, Mexico and Guatemala!
Photo © Alyssa D'Adamo of the HCP Why start here? Well, in a sense, it all started here. Just a stone’s throw away, the Aztec court first introduced the Spanish to chocolate 500 years ago. The Aztecs were getting it all from the Maya and other indigenous groups in what are now Guatemala and the southern Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas. (They even conquered Soconusco specifically to get ahold of its cacao, considered the finest in the world at the time.) Millions of beans were sent to the Aztec capital as tribute each year. The Spanish, of course, took over this protection racket from the Aztecs and expanded it, supplying cacao to the world (still on the backs of indigenous farmers) for centuries. So the Maya heartlands of southern Mexico and Guatemala had the oldest unbroken cacao traditions in the world, and they never lost them. You’d think this would make the region the epicenter of heirloom cacao. And according to Alejandro, who will be HCP’s pointman for this expedition—it is! In terms of weird and delicious cacaos grown in the middle of nowhere by people who have been at it for centuries, Mexico is the motherlode. 
Yet ironically, according to Alejandro, very few of these desirable cacaos ever make it into a chocolate bar or leave the country. Mexico is the drinking-chocolate capital of the universe—another unbroken tradition—and virtually every bean produced domestically is also consumed domestically.
That sounds like a good thing, but all is not well in the world of Mexican cacao. Mexico may be the drinking-chocolate capital of the universe, but that doesn’t make it the cacao-appreciation capital of the universe. The tradition here is to drink your chocolate so sweet that any fine points of flavor are hopelessly lost, so any especially delicious beans (and we are talking about the epicenter of criollo here) go for the same low price as any other beans. In such an environment, why would these cacaos still exist? Thanks to some combination of inertia, nostalgia, and love, says Alejandro. The old farmers still growing these quirky old varieties have known these trees their whole lives. Sometimes the trees predate the farmers. No, they’re not commercially viable—at least at current prices—but who cares? Neither is your old farmdog, but that’s no reason to get rid of him. He’s part of the family. Sounds like a job for HCP! And the timing is good. Although Mexico has barely had a culture of bean-to-bar chocolate, and its cacao farmers have had almost no encouragement to maintain their heirloom varieties, things are starting to change. Here in Mexico City, you can sense the first signs of revolution, a nascent culture of chocolate adoration that could awaken this sleeping giant. 
Let’s start with Alejandro, who launched his company, Revival Cacao, six years ago to give these cacaos the rapt attention they deserve—to return Mexico to its rightful position at the top of the cacao pyramid. He’s tracked down exceptional beans and farmers across Tabasco, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, and he supplies those beans to the rare bean-to-bar maker in Mexico, such as Cuna de Piedra. He’s even begun to export to the United States.
Alejandro feels that many of these farms contain varieties that have everything it takes to achieve heirloom status, and he’s thrilled that HCP is taking a look. He’ll be our pointman in Mexico, collecting samples from dozens of farms, as well as numerous wild areas, and submitting them for heirloom consideration. We’ll be tagging along, so expect to hear much more about that in the coming days. 
And along the way, you’ll hear about many other sparks of light in Mexico’s cacao awakening, some of which are flaring up right here in Mexico City. Let’s start with the Museum of Chocolate, aka MuCho. Launched in an elegant century-old building in Mexico’s historic district by architect Ana Rita García-Lascuraín, MuCho holds an extraordinary display of artifacts and dioramas covering both Mexico’s prehistoric and post-Conquest chocolate past, but it’s also remarkably hands-on. Visitors can grind cacao on a metate, as it’s been done for millennia, and they can sample MuCho’s own bean-to-bar chocolate, handmade on site using fine-flavor cacao from Mexican producers. Every day, hundreds of people walk out of MuCho’s doors with a new understanding of the heights Mexican chocolate once had—and could have again.
And for an even better sense of that future, meet the young couple making it happen just a few blocks away at La Rifa, Mexico City’s best chocolateria. Mónica Lozano and Daniel Reza have devoted themselves to working directly with small-scale cacao farmers in Tabasco and Chiapas, sourcing multiple varieties of criollo—including several different white cacaos—and turning them into half a dozen single-variety bars. They’ll even make you a super-frothy, 100% unsweetened, incredibly powerful drinking chocolate— possibly a first in Mexico City!
But as encouraging as these examples are, they are few and far between. These cacaos and regions are still virtually unknown to the greater chocolate world. So there’s work to be done. Something very special—something that couldn’t be more fundamental to chocolate’s history and identity—still exists in the famed regions of Chontalpa and Soconusco, but how much longer it can survive without outside help is anyone’s guess. The farmers certainly aren’t getting any younger. As Alejandro says, “It’s now or never.”
So here we go. We’re headed to Oaxaca City, the heart of Mexico’s cacao traditions, both ancient and contemporary, to get a grounding in those traditions. What do they mean to Mexican culture, what role do they have in contemporary Oaxacan life, and what can HCP do to help support that cacao culture and allow it to flourish in the modern world? After that, some hellacious roads and the deep jungle await. Wish us luck, and please follow along! 
 The HCP Board of Administrators and team members recently gathered at the Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education (BFREE) to strategize ways to better service our designees. Having the opportunity to meet in person, analyze our mission, and explore the ways we can effectively implement it into every piece of what we do was paramount to be able to practice what we preach. Our mission remains that to: “discover, identify and preserve fine flavor Heirloom cacao varieties for the conservation of biological diversity and the empowerment of farming communities.” and we are elated to share the many ways we will be moving forward as an organization. The scenarios we ran through during our discussions were realized at Maya Mountain Cacao where we were welcomed by the team. Maya mountain cacao is a collective of over 480 certified organic cacao farmers. They have implemented a support program for farmers who with to obtain organic status to guide them through their transition. During harvest season, Maya Mountain goes to villages as far as 60 km * to buy cacao from small-scale farmers. The beans are brought back to their facilities and processing begins immediately. The HCP was provided with a thorough explanation of their growing, fermenting, drying and export process. Maya Mountain primary buyer is Uncommon Cacao, which distributes the beans across the USA and Europe. Last year, they exported 100 metric tons of cacao, 6 of which were exported locally. Maya Mountain’s mission is very closely aligned with that of the HCP. “Since Maya Mountain’s inception, we have always maintained and kept true to our mission to support the livelihood of small farmers. We also seek to support women farmers. We currently have 44 female cacao farmers. The number is increasing.” - Serapio Chun, Cacao Operations Officer, Maya Mountain Cacao
In 2014, Maya Mountain Cacao (MMC) was designated Heirloom by the HCP. In 2018, HCP supported a nursery program at MMC funded by a grant through Penn State University. A clonal plot of 240 trees was planted, and this year they will be harvested for the first time. The plot sits proudly on a hill not far from the Guatemalan border overlooking the grand landscape of the Mayan Mountain Range. The trees are flourishing with colorful fruits of all different phenotypes. Through the site visit, it became clear that there are many maintenance challenges involved with the nursery. Visiting the farm and hearing the challenges first hand only enhances our drive to carry out our mission. We understand that we still have a lot of work to do. We’re taking active steps to integrate new systems and adapt old ones that will facilitate relationships across the value chain, create educational resources for farmers and retailers, and enhance the relationship between the farmers and our organization. CAPUTO’S MARKET AND LUISA ABRAM FIGHT TO PRESERVE BIODIVERSITY Caputo's Market and Deli located in SLC, UT, is a specialty food market and deli, focused on protecting and preserving the food traditions of the world's collective ancestors. The Caputo's are the largest supporter of the HCP, donating the proceeds of their annual Chocolate Fest since 2013.
Caputo’s Market and Luisa Abram Chocolate are launching a collaborative chocolate bar using a unique strain of unfarmed cacao (not found anywhere else in the world) from Brazil’s Jurua region in the upper Amazonian jungle, paid for pre-harvest by Caputo’s. The prepayment investment provides the foragers with the means necessary to harvest and process the wild cacao, build their own fermentary, and allows Luisa Abram to transform the cacao into chocolate. The entire US allocation of wild Jurua beans will be branded as the Caputo’s Wild Jurua 70% bar, and will be the only way US consumers can experience this exceptionally rare cacao. The companies are also planning “Amazon Camp,” an opportunity for Caputo’s crew members to visit the areas in Brazil in which cacao is harvested and see for themselves the challenges involved. Biodiversity, craftsmanship, and sustainability suffer when large scale chocolate makers take the lead. The effects of Covid 19 have only exacerbated the problem; during the beginning of the pandemic Luisa Abram's father Andre told Matt Caputo that his favorite bar, Jurua 70%, would be permanently discontinued. This bar was made with a genetic strain of wild cacao that only grows along the banks of the Jurua River in Brazil's Upper Amazon. He explained the mounting challenges and financial burden of foraging for and processing this incredibly unique cacao (in the world's most remote jungle) made it impossible to continue. Matt states: “As Andre explained their challenges, I...realized that any hope of making this wild crop economically viable may take a decade of investment. I knew their company was facing pandemic induced financial challenges and could not shoulder the burden.This is when I knew that despite our own pandemic emergencies, Caputo's could solve this. If we throw out any expectation of profit on this chocolate bar in the near future, we could prepay for the next harvest. Luisa and Caputo's together could make sure the small community in the Jurua had the money and guidance to set up their own fermentary and continue to return to Jurua to harvest this incredible cacao, year after year.” With Caputo’s guaranteed support, Luisa can purchase all of the Jurua cacao the foragers can procure. The Caputo’s Wild Jurua 70% bar isn’t about seeing a worthy investment return in this generation; it is about ensuring this crown jewel of cacao from the Amazon is protected for future generations. This isn’t the first time Caputo’s has stepped up to invest in an artisan in need; Mesa Farm, a cheesemaker in Southern Utah, credits Caputo’s for their survival through the company’s determined efforts to brand, sell, and support the craftsmanship demonstrated by Mesa Farm. With success stories such as Mesa Farm, one can only assume the new Wild Jurua bar will be around for years to come; and with it, the wild cacao from which it is crafted and the foragers whose livelihood depends on it. Learn more about the bar and the Caputo's Preservation Program (CPP) on their blog post here. By Jody Hayden, Grocers Daughter
One of the things I enjoy most at Grocer's Daughter Chocolate is sharing the story of cacao and chocolate with our customers. Even though many of us have enjoyed chocolate in some form or another since childhood, many don't know that it is derived from cacao, a pod-shaped tropical fruit bursting with sweet, tart flavor. Just like most agricultural products, the flavors we experience in cacao and the resulting chocolate can vary widely depending on genetics of the cacao, the microbiome of the fermentation area, and the amount of sunlight and rainfall each tree receives. These days we're experiencing an exciting renaissance in cacao and chocolate that conjures the days of the Mayans and other Mesoamericans who had very sophisticated preferences and preparations of cacao, mostly in the form of foamed beverages. Like these ancient gourmands, chocolate lovers are once again beginning to appreciate (and seek out) cacao and chocolate that celebrates the nuanced flavors of this incredibly complex food. To continue reading head to Grocer's Daughters website here. |
