Locally Made Chocolate of the Rare Nacional Cacao variety sourced from our Family Farm in Ecuador, South America.
Locally Made Chocolate of the Rare Nacional Cacao variety sourced from our Family Farm in Ecuador, South America.
Our chocolate is hand made by us in Saint Paul, Minnesota, using cocoa beans (cacao in Spanish) from our family's farm located in the ancient cacao growing region in the Babahoyo River Valley, where cacao has been growing for thousands of years and grown in plantations since shortly after the Spanish conquest in the early 1500's.
As newlyweds, we purchased the farm in the late 1990's from Ecuador's first female superior court justice, Dra. Eulalia Lopez Alvarez, who inherited it from her mother and for many decades leased it to smallholder farmers instead of actively farming it herself. This resulted in a large part of her farm never being replanted with newer, higher yielding cacao varieties like most cocoa farmers do as they improve the economic returns of their farms. This left us with thousands of old cocoa trees of what was called, a century ago, the famed Guayaquil variety of cacao, which is today referred to as Nacional variety, one of the rarest, but most flavorful, in the world.
Part of our agreement with the now late Dra. Eulalia when she sold us her farm for very cheap, just because she liked us, was that we would protect the natural wildlife which had grown in much of her then largely abandoned plantation. So, in most of the forest area in which the Ancient Nacional cacao trees live we established a legal ecological reserve, and we are a refuge for sloths and anteaters, including the endangered, palm-sized silky anteater and also a home to over 200 species of birds, such as the pacharacas, which can be heard cawing every morning by the thousands. The chocolate we sell supports our efforts to manage the wildlife refuge.
Although we have not certified our farm because of the high costs of doing so, our farm is completely organic, and we are slave free (it's still a thing in the chocolate industry, sadly), and we accept requests for visits in order to be transparent about this, as well as to see our wonderful wildlife refuge. Visits are being accepted now on a limited basis -- we have pretty rustic and basic accommodations still -- so just email us if you would like to to know more. jim@cacaoitaca.com
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