HEIRLOOM CACAO PRESERVATION FUND
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        • Tujikomboe Farmers Group, Tanzania
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        • BFREE, Belize
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        • Quantum Cacao, Costa Rica
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      • SOUTHEAST ASIA >
        • Pham Thanh Cong, VIETNAM
        • VO Thanh Phuoc, VIETNAM
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        • Helen de Vista, PHILIPPINES
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  • About Us
    • About HCP
    • How HCP Works
    • What is Heirloom Cacao?
    • Leadership
    • Meet Our Partners
    • FAQs
  • Our Heirloom Farmers
    • Our Heirloom Farmers >
      • AFRICA >
        • Tujikomboe Farmers Group, Tanzania
        • Akesson's Bejofo Estate, Madagascar
      • CENTRAL AMERICA >
        • BFREE, Belize
        • Maya Mountain Cacao, Belize
        • Quantum Cacao, Costa Rica
        • Kampura Farms, Guatemala
        • Finca Flores de Miriam, GUATEMALA
        • Finca Nahuatancillo, GUATEMALA
        • Nicalizo, Nicaragua
        • Chuno, Nicaragua
      • NORTH AMERICA >
        • Hawaii Agriculture Research Center
      • SOUTH AMERICA >
        • Alto Beni, Bolivia
        • Tranquilidad Estate, Bolivia
        • Hacienda Limon, Ecuador
        • ASOANE, Ecuador
        • Piedra de Plata, Ecuador
        • APOVINCES, Ecuador
      • SOUTHEAST ASIA >
        • Pham Thanh Cong, VIETNAM
        • VO Thanh Phuoc, VIETNAM
        • Puentespina Farms, PHILIPPINES
        • Helen de Vista, PHILIPPINES
    • Buy Heirloom Beans
    • Apply to the HCP
  • HCP in Action
    • Excellence on the Ground >
      • MEXICO
      • GUATEMALA
      • PERU
      • COLOMBIA
      • MADAGASCAR
    • Action Blog
    • EVENTS
    • Annual Reports
  • Get Involved
    • Donate
    • Ed Seguine Bursary Sponsorship
    • Chocolate Saves the World
    • Buy Heirloom Chocolate
    • Use of the HCP Mark
  • Resources
    • HCP Protocols
    • HCP Technical Nursery Guide
    • HCP Technical Training Videos
    • The Review
    • The Foundations of Flavor in Madagascar
    • Geological and Early Human Influences On Cacao Flavor
  • Contact
    • Subscribe
    • Press

​MEXICO


​

Episode 1: Mexico City

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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!
READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Episode 2: Oaxaca

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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.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Episode 3: The Real White Chocolate

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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.
​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.

Read the full article

Episode 4: Comalcan & Carmelo

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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.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Episode 5: In Search of the White Jaguar

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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.

In other words, it’s WILD. And that’s why we headed for it, following hours of rutty roads through a dreamscape of jagged hills, small settlements, and a raging river the color of an ice pack. It was here, on the edge of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, that the Mexican cacao experts Carlos Avendaño Arrazate and Alexander Mendoza López, from Mexico’s national institute for agriculture and forestry, came across some extremely unusual cacao trees during a collecting expedition in 2010. The trees were tall and spindly, the pods strange and small, both red ones and yellow ones. The beans were extremely white. They found 23 trees in all.

​
Read the Full Article

Episode 6: The Cradle of Criollo

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What made that cacao so desirable, of course, was that it was Criollo: white-beaned, less bitter, deliciously nutty. Criollo probably developed here from earlier strains in Colombia and Venezuela as the people of Mesoamerica kept planting the palest, least-bitter seeds from their favorite trees in their ongoing quest for the ultimate cup of chocolate.

​We’re here to find those beans, because the unique circumstances of Soconusco and the rest of Chiapas have made it—according to Alejandro Zamorano, our team lead in Mexico—a “living museum of cacao.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Background

In 2020 the HCP was granted funding through the Lesley Family Foundation program, which was broken down into three distinct phases.

Phase 1: Research
An in-depth investigation into past cacao discovery efforts has been conducted through research, surveying all existing literature and reports on the topic, connecting with people who have conducted discovery expeditions of their own through interviews to identify where there are gaps in research and where there is a need for expeditions.
An extensive report by Lambert A. Motilal titled, "The Review of Cacao Expeditions and Germplasm Movements" has been written, and published on October 17th, 2022 based on this research.

Phase 2: Expeditions
In 2023, the HCP will conduct expeditions to identified locations in Central and South America to discover the world’s rarest, most flavorful cacao. The main objective of the discovery expeditions is to unearth additional cacao trees that are unique in flavor and genetics, map and document them for future preservation and scientific research, and provide initial infrastructure and technical support for post-harvest process

​Phase 3: Roadmap for Future Expeditions
The final phase of this program is utilizing the information from The Review and HCP expeditions in order to develop a roadmap to steer future expeditions to uncover and preserve fine flavor Heirloom cacao.

The Crew

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Alyssa D'Adamo
​
Communications Coordinator,
The Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund
​Professional Videographer
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Rowan Jacobsen
Jacobsen is an esteemed author of eight books, and is currently working on his ninth, diving into the world of cacao. 
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Alejandro Zamorano Escriche
Founder & CEO Euro-American Cacao Company
Alejandro sources and exports the finest Mexican cacao beans.
The HCP Expeditions to Mexico, Guatemala and Peru have been made possible by the Lesley Family Foundation. 
support future expeditions
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