A large part of chocolate making is deciding where and how to source your cacao. Recently, we’ve partnered with Sarah Krupp to source beans from Colombia. The beans come from a village that uprooted their coca plants to grow cacao. The villagers removed the coca crops themselves, hoping to end continued violence that affected their community. Greg’s working closely with Sarah to bring in beans from this village, but there are recent obstacles. Two of the village’s most influential leaders have been threatened by a FARC commander and have been forced to leave the community.
Many of the regions that grow cacao have substantial economic and political turmoil. Sarah wrote this piece on the current political state of Colombia and its effect on the village growing our beans. We thought you would be interested in hearing more about where some of our cacao comes from.
thank you for sharing this. it is nice to see a company thinking about these important issues, and being forward with your audience.
Hey guys! So nice to hear about this connection, and I’m excited to hear this Colombian bar is in the pipeline. (I think you had one back in the day…) I was also wondering, though…I heard this effort to replace coca with cacao, led in part by the US government, uses commodity, non-flavor beans. Is this village part of the project? How are the beans?? 🙂
The beans are quite good! We did have the same concern that many of the replacement efforts used bulk cacao but the proof is in the chocolate and we made some chocolate from their beans and really liked it! Hopefully very soon you’ll be able to try a bar of it (or maybe even just a sample batch 🙂 ).