SUSTAINABILITY AND QUALITY
Posted on October 23 2017,
Chocolate has been a passion for Kristen since her early childhood years. While her vision was to create some of the best quality chocolate one could offer, in her endeavor to do so, she encountered many issues such as poverty, lack of knowledge in quality and no transparency in an industry that seemed to be so well established that the shift for change had proven difficult. With true sustainability in mind, she set out to redefine industry standards one chocolate at a time.
The primary issue the chocolate sector faces is its sustainability. It has been proven by the lack of desire on behalf of the farmer to continue to grow cacao as a crop. As a result, the future of the cacao tree and the chocolate thus created is at risk. Production has been in decline for years leaving us with a major quantity issue. Along side a quantity issue, we have seen a sever decline in the diversity of cacao. With these issues, and as a company that prides itself in quality, diversity and transparency, we source cacao and produce chocolate with the hopes that this will help to redefine the sector relating pricing, quality, and market such that the customer and the farmer are in control of the supply and demand.
It is known that there are three groups that cacao can be grouped into. These three groups are criollo, trinitario, and forastero. Each group has unique qualities that are inherently diverse and can be perceived by the market each in their own unique way. There are traits of each group that make way for a natural pricing structure that relates to the genetic qualities each represent.
Each grouping expresses traits that can be identified prior to processing which will require a unique fermentation method. Each varietal requires a different level of skill and attention and the results are unique.
The criollo trees currently represent less than 1% of the worlds cacao content and is growing less and less each year.
Cacao seeds cannot be saved for future generational plantings. Heirloom cacao only exists in trees and those trees are succeptable to disease and once they are gone, they are extinct.
With all of these factors, we as a company have endeavored to redefine the industry to relate the cacao to the market by a transparent protocol with pricing as it relates to the genetics and processing.