CHAPTER SIX

JUST DESSERTS FOR EVERYONE

Making Chocolate Sweet for the Farmers Who Grow It

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He turned and reached behind him for the chocolate bar, then he turned back again and handed it to Charlie. Charlie grabbed it and quickly tore off the wrapper and took an enormous bite . . . The sheer blissful joy of being able to fill one’s mouth with rich solid food!

—ROALD DAHL, FROM CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

On a cold and rainy weekend in November, eighty of the world’s best chocolate makers gathered together inside Seattle’s Pier 91 cruise terminal, greeting colleagues, chatting with friends, and tasting chocolate. This lovefest for chocolate, also known as the annual Northwest Chocolate Festival, is the biggest and most important artisanal chocolate event in North America. It brings together independent chocolate makers, bakers, equipment manufacturers, and regular folk, all willing to pay thirty dollars a day to taste samples, meet the visionaries, and listen to lectures on everything from the origins of the beans to the art of making truffles from an ingredient that one visitor called “the world’s most perfect food.”

The two-story, tin-roofed terminal building was crowded and loud, the buzz due to the poor acoustics, the curtain “walls” delineating each chocolate display area, and the fact that attendees were basically eating nothing but chocolate all day. (Being at a chocolate festival can really make you crave a nice salad.) Despite the crowd, everyone was smiling, grinning ear to ear. How could they not? As anyone who loves chocolate can tell you, chocolate boosts endorphins, packs powerful antioxidants, and activates the same brain regions as those that fire when you’re in love.

Most attendees seemed pretty serious about their sweets. They were taking notes, inquiring about the country of origin, snapping photos, or trying to decide if they should source from Guatemala or Ecuador when they start their own chocolate business.

This is a realistic question because it’s easier than ever for individuals to make and sell fine chocolate. Only a handful of the companies displaying at the festival existed fifteen years ago; many started within the last five years. Even chocolate bar companies that are staples for many chocolate connoisseurs today, such as Scharffen Berger, Chocolove, or Taza, are relatively new entrants into the chocolate industry. In 2000, there were maybe five craft chocolate makers operating in the United States. Today, there are something like two hundred of these companies, from small to large, making chocolate from the bean and selling bars to the public. The entire craft chocolate industry is basically a bunch of start-ups. During the past decade or so, independent chocolate makers have sprung up in New York and California, Seattle and Florida, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin, and states in between. There are husband-and-wife chocolate-making teams, CEOs-turned-chocolate-activists, backpackers-turned-cacao- exporters, and a few swashbuckling, Indiana Jones types who travel the world for exotic cacao.

Chocolate is a competitive industry, but the atmosphere at the Northwest Chocolate Festival felt cooperative and supportive. Everyone recommended talking to someone else. “Go meet the people from Uncommon Cacao; they are really at the forefront of working to raise the standard of living for farmers!” said one craft maker. “You need to talk to Carlos, who sources from Colombia,” said Emily Stone, cofounder of Uncommon Cacao. “Valrhona is an inspiration to me. They make a good product, source well, and pay a good price for their beans,” said Greg D’Alesandre of the San Francisco–based Dandelion Chocolate and coauthor of Making Chocolate: From Bean to Bar to S’More.

TASTES GOOD, DOES GOOD

Chocolate starts on the tree as cacao in odd, Nerf football–shaped pods of red or yellow or orange growing straight from the trunk and hanging from the branches. Each pod contains about fifty cacao beans swaddled in gooey white fruit. These beans, after being scooped out, fermented, dried, and ground for hours or even days, get made into chocolate. Cacao was named by famous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 1800s as Theobroma cacao, or “food-of-the-gods cacao,” a good description for the popular treat made from the bean.

With regard to sourcing cacao ethically at the farm, the small craft chocolate makers are the real leaders. Almost all craft chocolate makers have a story to tell about their passion for working with chocolate—and improving the lives of those who grow it. They’re sourcing directly from farmers or through cooperatives, helping increase yield and quality, and paying as much as three times the commodity price for raw beans. Some chocolate entrepreneurs got into it as a way to improve the lives of Central American farmers. Others seek to raise the standard of living for women and to transform local economies in chocolate-growing regions. Some were looking for a business that would let them work with a product that brings joy. One young maker in Hawaii decided he needed to do something more meaningful with his life than surf, and he hit upon starting a chocolate company using locally grown cacao.

Many chocolate makers are focused on the environment. Like Coffee, cacao is grown in the equatorial band on both sides of the equator, primarily by small-scale farmers, often in regions that are key areas of biodiversity—spots that provide habitats for birds, lizards, and other trees. Also like coffee, cacao can be grown under the shade of larger trees, making it an environmentally friendly crop, if grown in that way. Shade-grown cacao production is one way environmentalists are looking to preserve and bring back biodiversity and reduce deforestation. Cacao plants are also similar to coffee in that they’re vulnerable to climate change, and there is a great deal of concern in the chocolate industry about the long-term viability of the crop, not just among craft makers, but also by the major brands. Many leading environmental nonprofits and research institutions are also focused on creating a sustainable cacao sector.

The craft chocolate movement is also about taste. Mass-market chocolate, sometimes called industrial chocolate, can certainly be fun to eat and provide an instant pick-me-up, but the focus of these companies has long been low cost and consistent flavor, leading to bars and chips made from blends of lower-grade cacao mixed with a significant amount of sugar and often artificial ingredients such as vanillin and the emulsifier soy lecithin. Craft chocolate makers, on the other hand, look to winemakers, craft beer creators, and farm-to-table chefs for inspiration. As with these other movements, today’s chocolate entrepreneurs are after high quality and high impact, and finding unique flavor profiles from specific regions and beans. Many of the craft makers are devoted to the bean-to-bar movement—controlling all aspects of the final product, from how the cacao is grown at the farm to how the label looks in the store. They are artisans on a quest to expand the possibilities of taste.

I love chocolate because, well . . . the taste. And texture. I love all types of chocolate. I like getting a Hershey’s bar, or a chocolate chip cookie, or a jar of a great chocolate dessert sauce made with heavy cream by a Houston-based company I recently discovered called Somebody’s Mother’s.

Chocolate plays an important role in society, too. It’s a delicious treat and also a social lubricant, something we give to show affection, increase trust, or boost morale. Chocolate often serves as a gift, a way to say that we care. It’s an offering of friendship or romance or consolation that’s immediately understood.

In my own life, chocolate played an important role in my budding entrepreneurship. As a little girl, I had the total joy of being a Daisy and then a Brownie in the Girl Scouts program. Like other Girl Scouts, I sold cookies. My favorite Girl Scout cookies are the top sellers, Thin Mints and Caramel deLites (also called Samoas)—both covered in chocolate. When I was in first grade, the Girl Scouts had an incentive program to motivate girls to push more cookies; cookie sales actually generate significant revenue for the nonprofit. There was a catalog of things top sellers could earn, including a pink Barbie Corvette and a real bicycle.

To me, a bicycle was the biggest thing a person could get. It was the best present you might receive for Christmas, the one your parents would hide in the back and bring out at the very end. I had a bike, but the idea that I could have two, that a seven-year-old had the opportunity to earn something like that, was mind-boggling. It was like winning a car today. It made me recognize the value of being incentivized to reach a goal, especially in sales, and the motivating power of personal reward.

The experience with Girl Scout cookies also taught me how important healthy competition is. I remember very clearly the positive energy in the troop, the desire to see which girls could sell the most. It wasn’t a negative; it was a motivation. We were all encouraging one another rather than hoping others would fail. The more each girl sold, the better your whole troop would do.

I’m a natural saleswoman, I discovered (with somewhat mixed feelings). I wanted to be strategic about it, even back then. I asked my mother to give me the phone numbers of all the families who lived on one of the nicest streets in town, River Oaks Boulevard, a wide lane of stately homes leading to the country club. I thought, Surely these people can buy a lot of cookies! My mom did not want me to call up people I didn’t know and try to sell them cookies over the phone. (Nor was it clear that she actually had the phone number of every single resident on the street.) She countered by offering to drive me there and let me go door to door. For better or worse, I’d already focused on the role of purchasing power to make a difference.

Despite my positive memories of chocolate, and the near-universal affection for it, this sweetest of all foods has a very sour history from a labor and environmental perspective, when it comes to industrial chocolate sourcing. While craft chocolate makers are forming fair working relationships with smallholder farmers in Central and South America and the Caribbean, two-thirds of the world’s cacao supply still comes from the West African countries of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Cacao farming in these regions is notoriously rife with labor exploitation, from slavery to child labor to human trafficking. The average cacao farmer in Ghana makes eighty-four cents a day, while farmers in Côte d’Ivoire earn about fifty cents a day. Countries supplying cacao rely upon it economically and can be less than eager to expose labor exploitation that might drive buyers away. Cacao farming is also a cause of massive deforestation, destruction of animal habitat, and decimation of animals in West Africa—even within supposedly protected forests.

The Nestlé company, which buys 414,000 tons of cacao a year, says that the challenges with cleaning up the supply chain are complicated because so many cacao farmers are poor and have small plots of land with low productivity due to depleted soil and old trees that haven’t been replaced with newer, higher-yielding ones. As Nestlé’s official literature puts it, “They often resort to using their children for tasks that could be harmful to their physical or mental development and are therefore classified as child labor. Women in the cocoa supply chain are often under-rewarded for their work, or not given a voice in their communities.”

Andrew Savitz writes about cacao farming in his classic book on sustainable business, The Triple Bottom Line. As he explains, children in these countries can be “pulled from school, forced to work in the cacao fields and factories, and frequently injured on the job. Human rights activists have been protesting these conditions for years, and a number of food companies have responded with substantive changes.”

Chocolate is part of the livelihood of some estimated fifty million people worldwide, more than five million of whom are smallholder cocoa farmers. The United States is a huge buyer of chocolate, and the industry here provides nearly seventy thousand jobs in chocolate and candy manufacturing alone.

Before the explosion of craft chocolate makers, there was very little pressure from competitors on chocolate companies to clean up the supply chain. A few major retail players and large-scale traders dominated the chocolate industry. You could buy bars at the grocery store from Hershey’s, Nestlé, Mars, or even Cadbury. You might get a box of chocolates from Whitman’s or Fanny Farmer at the drugstore, or find high-end bonbons at a European chocolate boutique, or from a local confectioner using chocolate purchased from an established chocolate manufacturer to make and sell candy.

Then in 1997, Scharffen Berger began operating in San Francisco. This was the first independent chocolate maker of any real size in the United States in more than fifty years. The company sought out high-quality cacao from, among other places, Madagascar. They turned out chocolate bars that were dark and deep, complex and smoldering—similar to something you might buy from an established French chocolate maker like Valrhona. But these were made in America by a former lawyer and a former doctor. The bars were sophisticated and delicious, taking their cue, in part, from the wine and local food culture of the Bay Area.

Scharffen Berger was an instant hit among serious chocolate lovers. The Hershey Company took note, and in 2005 bought the craft chocolate maker for a reported $50 million. The next year, Hershey bought Dagoba, an organic, Rainforest Alliance Certified company founded in 2001 in Oregon by Frederick Schilling. Suddenly, other chocolate lovers realized that a market existed for high-end chocolate bars. These sales to Hershey ignited a wave of would-be chocolate makers and hobbyists to set up shop and go professional. As food writer Megan Giller says in her book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, chocolate lovers recognized a real economic possibility. “They saw the event as the turning point in their careers, when they knew that their passion had to shift from a hobby into a business,” Giller writes.

Technology also plays a part in today’s craft chocolate entrepreneurship. Improved communication, easier access to cacao growers, and an ever-growing online marketplace help facilitate start-ups. Online education also aids would-be chocolate creators. Many leading small-scale chocolate makers watched videos about making chocolate at home on the website Chocolate Alchemy, run by the now-legendary (in the chocolate world) John Nanci, who has been called “the godfather of kitchen-counter chocolatiering” by the New York Times. Some chocolate makers watched YouTube videos showing how to build roasters, grinders, and shellers from ordinary appliances like hair dryers, Shop-Vacs, and meat grinders.

For others, the introduction of small, inexpensive professional chocolate-making machines lowered the barrier to entry. When Scharffen Berger started, they were working in a huge, industrial-sized space filled with professional chocolate-making equipment from Europe—big, heavy, metal grinders and mixers, the kinds of machines that look like works of art themselves and cost tens of thousands of dollars. But chocolate can be made in smaller batches with lighter, less costly equipment, as a husband-and-wife team in Atlanta realized.

Andal Balu and Dr. Balu Balasubramanian, two scientists originally from India, launched CocoaTown in 2007. Before CocoaTown, they were running a company from their home base in Georgia that sold kitchen appliances for authentic Indian cooking. CocoaTown sells stainless steel grinders that can fit into an ordinary kitchen, as well as all the other pieces of equipment needed to turn cacao into chocolate—the roaster, cracker, cooling tray, winnower, and melangeur. These little machines can make anywhere from one to one hundred pounds of chocolate, and you can buy an entire set of their entry-level line for about $5,000. Many small craft makers working today started on CocoaTown machines and still use them. There still isn’t a Starbucks in the world of chocolate—no one major player raising the price per pound and habituating consumers to paying more for better-sourced, higher-quality beans. But taken as a whole, today’s small-batch makers are offering substantial, ethically sourced options for chocolate consumers. You can find out a great deal about the bars on the shelf. “Look for chocolate from a company that gives real information about the region the cacao is from, the farmers, and why this or that program they support matters. If it’s not on the bar, check their website,” says Maricel Presilla, chef, food historian, cacao importer, and author of The New Taste of Chocolate.

The big companies are starting to notice—as the sales of Scharffen Berger and Dagoba to Hershey indicate. Some people in the craft industry are optimistic about their collective influence. “We know we’re putting some pressure on the cacao industry because they talk to us,” says Greg D’Alesandre of Dandelion. “They ask us what we’re doing, and how.”

Craft chocolate makers are also influencing the larger industry by helping develop new sources of cacao. Many are looking closer to home at regions with good cacao genetics (or varieties) and no long history of labor exploitation in cacao. Craft makers are working with smallholder farmers, farmer cooperatives, and companies in Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and the Caribbean. They’re helping improve the crop at the source and sharing information with consumers about who exactly is growing these beans. They are showing the rest of the chocolate-producing (and chocolate-eating) world that chocolate companies can thrive while paying more than the commodity price for quality cacao that is grown in ethical and sustainable ways.

Meanwhile, various nonprofits like Mighty Earth and leaders in other countries, such as Prince Charles with his International Sustainability Unit, are exposing chocolate’s dark side to consumers and helping push the major manufacturers and traders to address labor exploitation and environmental destruction.

FROM BEAN TO BAR IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

You hear the pounding beat of merengue music everywhere in the Dominican Republic—at hotels, in squares, at weddings and parties—along with bachata, salsa, and reggaeton. Is all this music and dancing due to chocolate? Seems possible. The D.R., it turns out, is not only home to good factories like Timberland but is also the world leader in certified organic cacao. Cacao was first cultivated in South and Central America. The tree was brought to the D.R. by the Spanish in the 1600s and further developed by the French. Today, you’ll find old varieties and new hybrids of cacao growing in the dense, tangled cloud forests in the northern part of the island and in rolling green hills to the east.

In the craft chocolate world, the D.R. is known as the go-to source for nearly every company getting started because of its organic cacao and its proximity to the United States. There are direct flights to the D.R.’s three airports from many cities on the Eastern Seaboard. This, along with good roads and cell phone service, makes it easy for would-be (and established) chocolate makers to visit farms and do business.

HOW TO TALK CHOCOLATE

Cacao vs. Cocoa: These terms are used somewhat interchangeably. Cacao generally refers to the plant—a small, tropical evergreen tree whose flowers turn into gourd-like pods that each hold about fifty seeds within. These seeds are called “cacao beans” (or, to confuse matters, sometimes “cocoa beans”) and are the beginning of chocolate. Cocoa is the powdered form of chocolate used for hot and cold chocolate milk, and it is one product that can be made from cacao. There are two kinds of cocoa powder. Dutched cocoa (what’s inside a packet of hot chocolate mix) has been treated with an alkaline solution to make it easier to mix with liquid. Natural cocoa powder has not been alkalized. (Some companies will label their non-alkalized cocoa powder cacao to differentiate it from Dutched cocoa and perhaps to make it sound more authentic.)

Cocoa Nibs: Cocoa nibs have become an increasingly popular consumer item, and I love the company Sweetriot, which sells them in a tin. Cocoa nibs are crunchy, chewy little pieces of broken cocoa bean, about the size of a sunflower seed, that you can eat out of your hand. Cocoa nibs are made after the cacao pod has been picked, the beans scooped out, and then fermented, dried, roasted, and winnowed (had the thin shell or seed skin removed).

Chocolate Liquor vs. Chocolate Liqueur: If cocoa nibs aren’t packaged to be eaten (and they usually aren’t), they get ground into chocolate liquor, which isn’t alcoholic at all but rather a thick, unsweetened mass of chocolate, sometimes called “chocolate mass.” Chocolate liquor can then be made into eating chocolate, or separated into cocoa butter and a cocoa cake that can be ground and sifted into cocoa powder. Chocolate liqueur is an alcoholic drink, usually made from a vodka base and chocolate flavoring. (Some people have tried making a liqueur out of the husks of cocoa beans, but not with any widespread commercial success.)

Cocoa Butter vs. Butter: Cocoa beans are naturally 54 percent fat by weight, and all this fat is cocoa butter, which is derived by pressing chocolate liquor into its constituent parts of cocoa butter and the dry cocoa cake. (If you eat a cocoa bean, the cocoa butter makes it taste fatty and waxy, unlike a coffee bean, which is far harder and drier.) Cocoa butter is 100 percent nondairy. Butter is a dairy product, unrelated to chocolate.

Chocolate Manufacturer vs. Chocolate Maker: A chocolate manufacturer is a large company that makes any number of chocolate products from cocoa beans for the mass market, with perhaps a specialty line. Think Hershey’s. A chocolate maker also turns cacao into chocolate, but perhaps has a personal relationship with the cacao farmer, a focus on fine flavor, and a smaller, more specialized market of chocolate connoisseurs. Many chocolate makers today consider themselves chocolate artisans or craft chocolatiers. Think Dandelion, Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate, or most of the bars you find at a Whole Foods, a gourmet market, or in the specialty section of your grocery store.

Chocolate vs. Candy: Serious chocolate makers differentiate between what they do—turn cacao into a great-tasting food—and what candy makers do, which is buy chocolate in bulk from someone else to make fun sweets that may or may not have high-quality chocolate involved, or even all that much chocolate. As Dan Bieser from the Wisconsin-based craft chocolate company Tabal put it, “We don’t make candy. We make food. And it’s called chocolate.”

Couverture: The name given for bulk chocolate made by a chocolate manufacturer or chocolate maker and bought by candy makers, bakers, and restaurant chefs for making candy and dessert. Couverture can be very high quality. It generally has more cocoa butter added to the chocolate than is typical in a chocolate candy bar, enabling it to melt more easily and flow more smoothly over a truffle, say, or a cake pop. Your menu might read, “Chocolate-covered cheesecake,” but the chef ordered couverture to make that dessert.

Milk Chocolate vs. Dark Chocolate: Milk chocolate has milk added to it, in the form of milk solids and fat. It also usually has a lower percentage of cacao than dark chocolate. The popular Hershey’s milk chocolate bar (perfect for making s’mores) has 11 percent cacao. The FDA requires a bar to have 10 percent cacao in it to be labeled “chocolate.” Dark chocolate has no milk at all and may contain anywhere from 55 to 85 percent cacao, an amount usually noted on the wrapper. (Dark chocolate lovers so often look down on milk chocolate as a lesser version that a New York Times article about the new “dark milk” chocolate bars attempted to challenge this bias. The article cited “suave” bars by San Francisco–based Guittard, Seattle-based Theo, Scharffen Berger, Michel Cluizel, and Valrhona as particularly good options.) “Don’t be intimidated by chocolate artisans who say, ‘It has to be 90 percent cacao for me,’” insists Julian Rose, a chef and master chocolatier of Moonstruck Chocolate in Portland, Oregon. “Most people like milk chocolate, even if they eat it in the closet, in the dark.”

Terroir: This French word, long used to help describe wine, means “territory”—as in the place where a grape (or cacao pod) grows. A location’s soil composition, sun, rain, mulch, frost, etc. affect the flavor of the produce grown there. As chocolate makers pursue and attempt to convey greater understanding of cacao flavor, they increasingly discuss terroir.

White Chocolate: This is candy. There’s no actual cacao in it, just a huge amount of cocoa butter and sugar, along with milk solids and milk fat, lecithin, and vanilla (and maybe little googly eyes and a sugar nose, if it’s an Easter bunny).

The D.R. is also known in the chocolate world for its high-quality cacao “genetics”—the term cacao professionals use to describe the type of cacao plant—which makes the not-too-difficult trip doubly worth it. The taste of a chocolate bar is affected by how the crop is grown, the postharvest technique, the skill of the chocolate maker, and the specific type of cacao plant.

Another major draw of the D.R. is its well-developed, sophisticated cacao infrastructure. In the vast majority of the cacao-growing world, smallholder farmers grow the beans, ferment and dry them, and then sell them to whoever is buying—usually middlemen or coyotes. This decentralized, every-farmer-for-himself approach leaves growers vulnerable to accepting whatever price they can get from whatever buyer wanders past. If no one comes by to buy the beans, the farmer’s haul that day might rot, meaning no income from that load. It also means inconsistent flavor from farm to farm because the beans are fermented and dried in different, and often haphazard ways.

In the D.R., in contrast, a handful of producers buy wet beans from farmers—as in, scooped out of the cacao pods and dumped in a bucket or sack. The producers then handle the fermenting and drying and selling, adding value to the crop by constantly working to improve their processes. This centralized system makes the quality of the cacao consistent. The high-quality beans also bring higher prices, and the producers have far more bargaining power than an individual farmer does. As D’Alesandre of Dandelion Chocolate puts it, “In the D.R., a big producer like the family-owned Rizek can say to a craft maker, ‘I can make exactly what you want, but you’re going to pay for it.’ Or the cooperative producer Conacado can say, ‘We’re a fair trade, certified organic co-op, and if you want our better beans, you will pay more for it.’ It’s also easier for the farmers. They can harvest the pods and get paid the next day, and they get a pretty good price.”

The production facilities in the D.R. classify the beans as unfermented or fermented. Fermenting improves the flavor of the cacao and the resulting chocolate. Unfermented beans, usually the lower-quality ones (labeled “Sanchez” in the D.R.) are generally sold to big chocolate manufacturers to use in lower-end, candy-grade chocolate. The fermented beans, classified as “Hispaniola,” are more expensive to buy and offer a richer, more complex taste. This classification system is another reason for the D.R.’s popularity as a cacao-producing region. Craft chocolate makers buy fermented beans exclusively, and in the D.R., they know what they’re getting. Half of the sixty thousand tons of cacao produced annually in the D.R. is classified as Hispaniola, meaning half of what farmers produce earns them the higher price of the better product.

The D.R. is a role model for other cacao-growing countries. It’s also a great example of the connection between private sector investment and economic and social development. Investment in the country by various types of businesses—in things like roads and telecommunications—has increased the ease of operation for many sectors, including cacao. People you meet working throughout the cacao sector, from small farmers to large producers, have completed high school and gone on to college. Unlike Haiti, where plastic bottles are everywhere, the highways and back roads in the D.R. are free of that kind of litter. The sidewalks in the well-preserved, historic Colonial Zone of the capital, Santo Domingo, are practically spotless. Most people have access to running water here, meaning there’s less need for bottled water, and the development of recycling facilities also plays a part in the city’s clean streets. In the D.R., it’s easy to trace the positive social and environmental impact of a company paying more for high-quality cacao that ends up in higher-priced chocolate bars that you or I can decide to buy.

CACAO TOWN

The center of the cacao industry in the Dominican Republic is in San Francisco de Macorís, a city in the northern part of the island, north of Santo Domingo and west of Punta Cana, the oceanfront resort town on the island’s eastern tip. While Punta Cana has become famous as a sun-and-sand destination, great for rest and relaxation, restaurants and nightclubs, golfing, all-inclusive family resorts, and sports like zip-lining, windsurfing, kayaking, and sailing, San Francisco de Macorís is a low-key agricultural center. It feels like a farming community in the United States, maybe like California’s Central Valley—but a steamy, tropical version of it. There’s a busy, utilitarian feeling to the place, with the focus on work and earning.

Chocolate makers, investors, and people working for nonprofits fly in and out of the airport in nearby Santiago. Everyone seems to know everyone else. A leader of the island’s largest cacao producer, the cooperative Conacado, dropped by one of the town’s two business hotels to share information with me about the group’s social service programs. In the hotel restaurant, he paused to greet two young men from France who were in town to work on a development initiative funded by several French chocolate makers and led by Valrhona. At the ice cream store on the town’s central square, the editor of the local paper greeted the founder of the island’s smallest cacao exporter, Zorzal Cacao.

Most of the action in town happens at processing facilities and large office complexes. On the smooth, well-paved main road, you pass tin-roofed fermenting sheds and tentlike drying facilities. A huge white office building owned by Rizek, one of the largest cacao producers in the country, rises next to a Nestlé facility on the way to the headquarters of Öko-Caribe, a boutique-like producer that buys from 165 farmers working more than 1,000 hectares of organic land and sells to craft makers around the world.

The cacao itself grows in the hills to the north and to the east. Visiting a cacao farm in the wet and misty cloud forest up north can mean stepping into a pair of knee-high black rubber boots and then hiking through the jumbled-looking tropical farmland. You step on fallen leaves slick with rain, lower yourself gingerly down mud steps cut into the slope of a valley, hop across stones in a swirling creek, then climb back up a hill on the other side. You might see a macadamia tree with its huge canopy, and a tiny, speckled green lizard darting across a guava tree. Sweet lemons grow around you, and you can pick one off a tree to eat.

Cacao trees, tall and thin with oval leaves, are less distinctive looking than coffee trees. But the cacao pods themselves look like Christmas tree decorations from some far-off planet. They hang like colorful ornaments from the branches, sprouting off the sides of the trunks, and crowd together in clusters of orange, red, and yellow.

When you pull a ripe pod from the tree, it feels hard and slightly bumpy. You crack it open with a machete or by bashing it against the trunk. The cacao seeds are clumped together inside in one long, fat column covered with slick, white goo, clinging to the side of the pod like a small alien baby. You can pull off an individual bean and suck on it, the white, gooey fruit as sugary and tart as a SweeTart. The cacao beans themselves are bitter and waxy, the cocoa fat evident even in the raw state.

To begin the process of transforming these wet, pulp-covered beans into high-quality chocolate, farmers have only about six hours to get them from the cracked-open pods to the fermenting shed; any longer than that and the sugar of the fruit begins to turn bad, or even rot.

At Finca Elvesia, a historic cacao plantation in the island’s eastern Hato Mayor region, beans are brought by horse from the highlands down to the finca’s fermenting and drying sheds. The finca both grows and buys beans, and handles the drying and fermenting. Finca Elvesia was founded in the late 1800s by Swiss immigrants, and its rolling green hills, big sky, and little manager’s house resemble Switzerland (minus the snowcapped mountains, plus palm trees).

Fermenting sheds look more or less the same everywhere on the island. Generally, you see three levels of big wooden fermenting boxes with oxidized metal hinges. They look like giant steamer trunks, or maybe old treasure chests. The wet beans are dumped into the top row of fermenting boxes, then covered with banana leaves. They sit there for about two days, then are moved down to a second box for a couple more days, and then a third. The fermenting happens naturally, as yeast from the cacao pods (and the machetes, insects, and workers’ hands) “eats” the sugary white goo enveloping the beans. Fresh air and bacteria mix with the beans during each move, helping with the fermentation.

You can feel the heat from fermentation if you hold your hand over an open box. If you move aside the banana leaves and reach down into the beans, you feel a slimy, slippery mess that eventually reaches 120 degrees, much hotter than a hot tub. When you pull your hand out, the now-brown goo sticks to your fingers.

After fermenting, the beans are transported to long, low drying tents with domed tops, and spread out on wire mesh drying tables or, as at Finca Elvesia, on elevated wooden platforms. They’re still in their skins at this stage and look like whole almonds. In the D.R., many drying sheds have indoor blowers or heat lamps to combat the humidity of the island. Cacao beans have to reach a specific level of dryness before they can be packed in huge sacks to ship.

Like many producers here, Finca Elvesia cultivates both fermented and unfermented beans, selling them at different prices to different markets. You can taste the difference raw. At Finca Elvesia, it’s so hot in the drying tent that the beans are warm and crisp and have a roasty flavor. The fermented bean has a more complex, slightly wine-like taste, even in its raw state.

Finca Elvesia sells Rainforest Alliance Certified and certified organic cacao to many craft makers, including Dick Taylor Chocolate, Taza, and Scharffen Berger. After Hershey acquired Scharffen Berger, the company continued to source from Finca Elvesia and to pay the premium for the certified, high-quality Hispaniola beans. This is a small part of Hershey’s overall operations, but it’s encouraging to see a major chocolate manufacturer being a good customer for a tiny farm like this.

Finca Elvesia employs about fifteen people full-time and another twenty or so temporary workers during the two annual harvests, many of them Haitians who have crossed over to the D.R. in search of work. There is on-site housing for some of the temporary workers, while others live down in one of the nearby villages.

Finca Elvesia currently exports its fermented and dried beans through Rizek, which also owns a variety of other businesses on the island. When Hurricane Georges hit the island in 1998, it damaged nearly all the cacao plantations. Rizek stepped in, helping farmers rehabilitate their lands with new trees and offering free training and education to help ensure the success of the newly planted trees. The company formed a social services foundation, called Fuparoca, to meet these needs in an ongoing way. “It’s a two-way relationship,” says José Efraín Camilo, Fuparoca’s manager of compliance and certifications. “Fuparoca is a social hand of Rizek, designed to help the farmer. But better quality and higher yield also ensure the cacao bean we trade.”

In 2004, Fuparoca began helping farmers obtain organic and other certifications, and it now employs about twenty agricultural technicians, or “agronomists,” who have been educated at universities in San Francisco de Macorís, Santiago, or Santo Domingo. These agronomists travel to farms and production facilities all over the country, offering training and workshops in farming techniques and organic and sustainable cocoa plantation management.

Fuparoca has also improved the access roads and bridges leading to rural communities, which helps children get to school and family members get to work. The foundation works to identify water sources near communities that lack running water, and builds pumps and reservoirs to bring water to these families. The foundation also provides first aid kits and training, buys school supplies for about thirty rural elementary schools, and provides things like chairs, keyboards, chalkboards, and building upgrades. To me, this is another example of the kind of broadly beneficial, incentivized investment so evident in the D.R.

HARNESSING THE MARKET IS FOR THE BIRDS

About an hour north of San Francisco de Macorís, high up a winding, dirt road that turns to mud in the rain, is an organic cacao farm that is part of the nation’s first private nature reserve. Called Reserva Zorzal, this 1,000-acre reserve and farm was created by an American named Charles Kerchner, along with the Moreno family of the D.R., and the New York–based Eddy Foundation. Kerchner is a glasses-wearing academic type who spends half his time swashbuckling around the lush, tropical cloud forest of this reserve-cum-cacao-farm, and the other half working as a land management consultant in the United States.

On the long drive up to Zorzal, you pass thick, new-growth trees blanketing the hills. These hills were recently used for cattle grazing and nearly deforested, but plants grow fast in the cloud forest. You finally arrive at a wide, grassy plateau, park in the short grass, step out of the truck (now caked with mud), and instantly smell chocolate—a very unexpected (and very welcome) scent to find wafting toward you high in the cloud forest.

The aroma comes from the beans fermenting in a warehouse and drying in the long, low sheds visible to the right, and from the melangeur—a chocolate mixer churning on a picnic table in the open-air ground floor of the farm’s two-story office and welcome center. It’s incredibly peaceful up here, the only sounds coming from a few birds chirping in the distance and the melangeur’s metal wheels pushing liquid chocolate over and under and over again. The melangeur is about the size of a personal chocolate fountain you might buy at Target, but the chocolate here is actually being ground and mixed with sugar, not just cascaded.

To create a quality chocolate bar, the melangeur would have to continue grinding the sugar and chocolate particles down to five microns, the size necessary to be indiscernible by the tongue. This can take a full day in a tabletop model; large, professional chocolate makers use far bigger, more powerful machines. Some chocolate makers then dump this velvety, delicious liquid into yet another machine, called a conche, for more mixing. This molten chocolate is then tempered, a chemical process of heating and cooling that gives chocolate its nice sheen and satisfying snap when breaking. Tempered chocolate is poured into a mold to harden, then sold.

The rest of Zorzal’s chocolate-making equipment sits in the tiny kitchen, basically a toaster-oven-size roaster and a grinder that looks like a home meat grinder. Zorzal Cacao is not a chocolate maker but rather a cacao farm and processor. The low-tech equipment here is to make samples for potential buyers, conservationists, students (and authors).

Dipping a spoon into liquid chocolate made from freshly picked and roasted beans is a high point of this farm tour. This isn’t just bean to bar; it’s tree to tongue, a truly amazing chance to be one with nature and with the all-natural “food of the gods.”

Then it starts raining, that tropical-style downpour that begins in an instant, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s so humid in the open-walled seating area already that the actual rain doesn’t feel like a huge change. Why get up? (Especially when you’re sipping espresso and licking molten chocolate from a spoon.)

Kerchner says he first visited the D.R. nearly twenty years ago while in the Peace Corps. Years later, while pursuing a PhD in forestry in Vermont, he was drawn to the D.R. again after learning that it is the winter home of a palm-size northeastern songbird called the Bicknell’s thrush. Bird-watching is a big part of Vermont’s summer tourism industry, but the female Bicknell thrush was disappearing from the Vermont woods. What was the cause? A diminishing food supply in the D.R. due to clear-cutting of the cloud forest. The question for Kerchner was not if conservation matters, but rather how to pay residents to not clear-cut their land and instead leave a habitat for the birds that split their time between the two nations.

He began looking for a business solution to the problem of land conservation and hit upon the idea of establishing a private reserve that would be funded, in part, by sales from an adjoining cacao farm. Working with the D.R.-based nonprofit Fundación Loma Quita Espuela and the Dominican Environmental Consortium, Kerchner created the Reserva Zorzal and Zorzal Cacao.

Today, a full two-thirds of Reserva Zorzal’s land is the nature preserve, and Kerchner works to protect this critical area of biodiversity with a strategy similar to that of Conservation International and Starbucks with coffee—using sales from the cacao to pay for reserve management and hiring and helping locals to ensure its sustainability. Cacao plantations are very important to the biodiversity of the D.R. because they provide habitats for birds, reptiles, and butterflies, and rely on the continued growth of native trees for shade. The D.R. has more than six hundred rare plant species, as well as dozens of species of birds and reptiles, which makes it a biodiversity hotspot.

Kerchner also works with an international carbon standard called Plan Vivo to sell carbon offsets from the farm and from neighboring farms. Plan Vivo has established a protocol for carbon offsets in the voluntary market. Big companies (including JetBlue, Disney, and Google) “buy” carbon offsets around the world as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives, essentially paying someone else to plant trees, or not cut down trees, to meet their own carbon reduction aims. Zorzal sells offsets to chocolate companies that buy cacao beans. If a company buys cacao from Zorzal, part of the cost per ton goes toward planting trees. Since starting, Zorzal has planted about 250 acres of trees through Plan Vivo, and farmers living in the buffer zone around the protected area are paid every year to maintain a healthy forest.

Reserva Zorzal also creates jobs in wildlife monitoring and boosts the income of nearby farmers by educating them on best practices and by buying their wet cacao. One-third of its own land is dedicated to growing super-high-quality cacao. The company then ferments and dries it with an artist-like quest for perfection, and sells it for around double the commodity price to equally passionate chocolate makers.

In the final stage of drying at Zorzal, the beans are moved to the last shed in the line, this one with a concrete floor. Everyone tiptoes around in socks, keeping the floor clean, while two workers shovel the beans around, turning them to complete the drying. One worker, wearing a green T-shirt that says Hawaii, sits at a table in the middle of the room, patiently cutting one hundred beans in half lengthwise and laying out the split-open pairs in rows before him. Kerchner or another worker grades the beans by looking at the cracks in them; the more cracks, the better the fermentation. If a batch is less than 80 percent fermented, the whole lot becomes grade B, which may be used for cocoa powder, nibs, and chocolate bar blends. The care these producers take with their beans is amazing. It’s as if the special feeling of receiving a box of fine chocolates starts at the farm.

Marcos Antonio Lajara, or “Veho,” grew up in the cloud forest near Zorzal and has been working in cacao most of his life. For years he sold beans to large producers, having to pay someone with a truck to bring them down the hill—a time-consuming, arduous journey that could lead to rotting beans. When Zorzal opened high in the hills, Veho began selling the beans he harvests to the company, and also working for it. The new cacao facility has made a huge difference in his life and the lives of other locals. “Before, this big farm had cows, and they would come into people’s land or wander on the road. There was no employment for the people here,” says Lajara.

The higher price for beans has enabled Lajara to continue improving the farm he manages (which is owned by a doctor in San Francisco de Macorís), and his home life. Despite the huge advances in the D.R. during the past couple of decades, rural communities like his still lack electricity and running water. Since working for Zorzal, he’s been able to buy solar panels to generate energy at home. He and his wife and three children now have lights—and the Internet. (They still collect rainfall for drinking water.) The extra earnings have led to more food security, books, and clothes. Lajara also bought one of the little motorbikes you see everywhere in the D.R., which enables his children to get to school more easily. His oldest daughter, now twenty-one, has begun working at the Zorzal basecamp, cooking traditional Dominican dishes for visitors and coordinating visits.

Zorzal also built the road, such as it is. The difference this road has made to the community is huge, says Lajara. “It’s like the difference between the dirt and the sky. The road and electricity are the most important things for rural people.”

Lajara, slim and fit, is dressed in jeans, a T-shirt with the Puma logo, a baseball cap, and the black rubber boots you need to tromp around this area’s muddy farmland. He looks at home in the Zorzal basecamp as he pulls up a chair and sits down. The small size of this operation has allowed Kerchner to get personally involved with the farmers he buys from. Recognizing the pride Lajara takes in the land, Kerchner encouraged him to start working as a nature and bird-watching guide for visitors. Kerchner also paid, with help from a grant, for Lajara to travel with him to the United States to learn more about conservation efforts and to meet the chocolate makers who ultimately use the beans.

Involving workers in the mission is part of the Zorzal vision. “We need the people we work with to understand what we’re doing so they can make their own decisions about what’s valuable,” says Kerchner. “If you have the opportunity to go to Boston and Vermont and meet chocolate makers who use your beans, you get it. It’s a development model, a way to ‘show, not tell.’ If he understands why it’s important to produce the best cacao, it’s better for us.”

One of the chocolate makers that buys from Zorzal is Raaka chocolate in Brooklyn. In late 2017, Raaka signed a partnership deal with JetBlue Airways to provide chocolate—made from 100 percent Zorzal cacao—for little squares to be given to passengers flying in the airline’s premium class cabin. I love this partnership because it means a big order from Zorzal that will raise the company’s visibility and potentially help generate more clients. (Also, I think it’s great for an airline to offer chocolate. I almost always travel with chocolate in my purse, and I love the idea of being able to replenish my supply on a plane.)

On the way back down to the city from Zorzal, the road is even muddier than in the morning, the afternoon’s rain having pounded new gullies. Two small rivers have swollen over their bridges, and the truck has to forge through the water to keep going. A man leading two donkeys walks slowly downhill, each donkey carrying two huge sacks of yams on its back. The donkeys’ fur is slick from the rain, and the saddle on one slips, spilling yams into the mud. The man halts his animals and begins the slow process of retrieving the yams. Economic development can feel like this—two steps forward, one step back—a nation with a Bentley and a Maserati dealer in the capital city, and rural farmers transporting produce on pack animals through the rain. But it’s exciting to see the steady rate of progress on this island and how far it has reached, at least partially, into the remote rural areas.

THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD’S MOST PERFECT FOOD

If chocolate follows the lead of other farm-to-table-type movements, we’re likely to see more locally made, fine-quality chocolate in cities and towns across the nation, and an increased general knowledge of the flavor profiles of various origins and beans. But will this improve the supply chain of the major chocolate corporations? A look at the official position of household names like Hershey’s, Nestlé, and Mars—and some recent public commitments—suggests it already has.

Hershey published its first corporate social responsibility report in 2010; today, the company’s CSR report sounds a lot like the mission statements of many craft chocolate makers. As of 2017, 75 percent of its cacao was certified by Rainforest Alliance, UTZ, or Fair Trade USA, and the company has made a commitment to source 100 percent of its cacao sustainably by 2020. Hershey supports farmers in their effort to get these certifications, regardless of where their cacao ultimately goes. “They can sell that cacao to whomever they choose. The goal is that they’re trained to follow sustainable practices and appropriate labor practices as part of how they’re operating their farm,” explains Hershey’s director of communications, Jeff Beckman.

Hershey also uses the Web app Sourcemap, which provides supply-chain visibility to consumers—at least of some of its products. You can trace the source of certain ingredients in Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bars with Almonds and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups using this online tool. I think this is a great start. Hershey also continues to source from small farms like Finca Elvesia in the D.R. for Scharffen Berger and Dagoba, and having the might of a major corporation behind them is benefiting these specialty lines.

EAT YOUR VALUES

Which bar should you choose? Check out these chocolate visionaries who are focusing on building relationships with farmers, publishing sourcing reports, and changing the world, one bar at a time. As Emily Stone of Uncommon Cacao says, paying a little more can make a real difference to growers. “Look for chocolate bars that are three dollars and up, a good consumer benchmark that farmers have been paid well. If you’re willing to spend four or more dollars, you’re likely also supporting small-holder farmers and a small business.”

Amano: Considered one of the best-tasting bars by many in the craft chocolate industry, Orem, Utah–based Amano chocolate has won gold, silver, and bronze awards for years at the “Olympics of Chocolate”—the International Chocolate Awards—as well as at other competitions. (Yes, there are chocolate competitions.) Founder Art Pollard is obsessed with quality and taste, and has formed direct-trade relationships with farmers in places including Venezuela, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Papua New Guinea. Be sure to try their Raspberry Rose 55%, Madagascar 70%, and Cardamom Black Pepper 60%.

Askinosie: Named one of Forbes’s “Best Small Companies in America,” this Springfield, Missouri–based family-owned company sells bean-to-bar, single-origin, direct trade chocolate and weaves social responsibility into everything they do, including projects with cooperatives and women’s groups in Africa. Askinosie also does profit-sharing with farmers in Ecuador, Tanzania, and the Philippines, and provides lunch to nearly three thousand children at schools in the communities where they work. Each bar has a picture of the farmer on it, which is one way the company tries to connect consumers to the source. Founder Shawn Askinosie is also a Family Brother at Assumption Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Missouri. Try the 60% Dark Chocolate and Peanut Butter from Tanzania (peanut butter sourced from Durham, North Carolina–based Big Spoon Roasters) and Dark Chocolate and Malted Milk 60% bar (malt flavor in collaboration with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams).

Dandelion Chocolate: This bean-to-bar chocolate factory opened in the Mission District of San Francisco in 2010, partly in homage to formerly SF-based Scharffen Berger. Dandelion takes the art of chocolate very seriously, hand-sorting beans sourced from farmers, painstakingly roasting batches to get the right flavor, and limiting ingredients to cacao and sugar—no added cocoa butter, vanilla, or lecithin. Dandelion is also focused on transparency and consumer education through its website and book. Visit the factory/café in San Francisco or Tokyo and watch chocolate being made while you sip hot chocolate and munch on a pastry. You can also travel with Dandelion to visit cacao producers. Check the website for details. Try bars made from single estates, such as the 70% cacao from Hacienda Azul in Costa Rica.

Endangered Species Chocolate: Using Fairtrade America–certified cacao sourced from West African farmers, Indianapolis, Indiana–based Endangered Species Chocolate donates 10 percent of net profits to support conservation efforts. ESC has a beautiful impact report available online that shows the animals your purchase benefits (rhinos, chimpanzees, and lions, oh my!). You can also see where in the world they live, and how much money the company has given to its wildlife-focused partners—more than $1.3 million in the past three years. Try ESC’s Dark Chocolate with Peppermint Crunch 72% and Dark Chocolate with Caramel and Sea Salt 60%.

Guittard: In the mid-1800s, Etienne Guittard left France for California, hoping to strike it rich with gold. He carried chocolate from his uncle’s factory to trade for mining supplies. The miners quickly bought up all his chocolate. Recognizing another kind of gold, Guittard sailed back to France to learn the craft, returning to San Francisco in 1868 to open Guittard Chocolate. Today, this fifth-generation, family-owned company makes fair trade certified bars, chips, and couverture and focuses on community involvement and environmental stewardship.

Pacari: This Ecuadorian company has a direct relationship with its farmers, paying a premium and running social programs. They participate in organic and biodynamic farming and process their own cacao. “It is the best chocolate coming from Latin America that has had the most impact,” says chocolate scholar and author Maricel Presilla.

Raaka: This Red Hook, Brooklyn–based chocolate company strives for environmentally and socially responsible production of delicious chocolate creations that showcase “the wilder side of cacao.” The certified organic, kosher, non-GMO “wild” bars include flavors such as Bananas Foster (68% cacao, with organic bananas and organic vanilla bean), Coconut Milk (60% cacao) bar from Zorzal Cacao in the Dominican Republic, and the Limited Batch Ginger Snap (70% cacao). You can also book a tour and take a class.

Tabal: Founded in 2012 by former high school principal Dan Bieser, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin–based Tabal is one of the Midwest’s few bean-to-bar, certified organic, and kosher chocolate makers, offering, among other things, single-origin bars. Tabal focuses on great chocolate and great relationships, and sources beans from farmers or co-ops in a dozen different locations, including Costa Rica and Colombia. Order online or buy at their chocolate lounge and factory store, where you can also take a class in chocolate. Try their Peru 70% with chili peppers or cherries, and their Dominican Republic Espresso Crunch 70%.

Theo: Founded in Seattle in 2006 by Joe Whinney, Theo is one of the largest and most respected of the bean-to-bar makers, and a pioneer organic cacao user. Whinney reportedly fell in love with Central America and Africa in the late 1990s and formed a chocolate company to share the love. Theo has relationships with individual farmers and cooperatives, and pays far above the commodity price. Take a factory tour at the Seattle location to learn more. Try the Coconut Turmeric Chocolate Clusters, Salted Almond 70% Dark Chocolate, and Cinnamon Horchata 45% Milk Chocolate bar.

Together We Bake: Not a craft chocolate maker, this Alexandria, Virginia–based nonprofit helps women who have left abusive homes, overcome addiction, or transitioned out of prison by giving them a second chance. Together We Bake employs women, teaching them to make delicious chocolate chip cookies according to a secret recipe. I love these cookies, and I bring them to every To the Market event possible to highlight their great work (and have great snacks on hand).

Valrhona: Valrhona has been making chocolate in the small village of Tain-l’Hermitage, France, since 1922. Until the craft chocolate movement began, Valrhona was considered the best chocolate in the world—for both eating and baking—by many chocoholics and professional pastry chefs. Despite its size, Valrhona is also considered a bean-to-bar maker by some. The company has even begun operating its own plantations in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. Valrhona is also a leader in social programs at the source, fostering good relationships with farmers and paying attention to detail from bean to bar.

And one more thing . . . You can help preserve high-quality cacao and the livelihood of those who farm it by donating to the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund (HCPF). This nonprofit, launched in 2012 in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Fine Chocolate Industry Association, is dedicated to protecting cacao diversity and improving the lives of farmers who grow fine-quality heirloom cacao species. The HCPF helps cacao farmers deal with environmental change, deforestation, and economic influences threatening these distinctive, high-quality cacao trees. The HCPF is the first initiative to identify and map high-quality, endangered cacao and certify growers.

In 2017, Dagoba’s new brand manager, a former social worker turned chocolate evangelist named Susie Picken Burch, convinced Target to carry four new bars from Dagoba in all 1,800 of its U.S. stores. This was a huge order for this small company, and one that translated into more beans being bought from Finca Elvesia and other small farms. Burch is also developing programs to help increase women’s agency in the four countries of origin that supply cacao to Dagoba, starting with Peru.

Closer to home, Hershey is helping stock a food pantry for schoolkids and their families in the Derry Township school district of Pennsylvania, where the company’s headquarters are and where food insecurity is a problem for some.

The Hershey Company is also part of the industry group World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), as are the other major brands. Through WCF, the big chocolate companies have founded something called CocoaAction, an industry-wide strategy focused on sustainability. In 2016, these major producers also joined another WCF initiative, the Climate Smart Cocoa Program, which aims to strengthen public/private partnerships to address the threat of climate change on the cacao supply. (Kellogg’s, owner of a Girl Scout bakery, is also participating in this program, which I was so happy to discover.) “We started talking about the problems we’re facing, and openly sharing information as much as possible about the farmer,” says Jeff King, senior director of sustainability, CSR, and social innovation at Hershey. “The industry is extremely proud of the fact that they were able to come together and meet around the table and talk about these issues.”

DASH ON DOWN TO THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

The D.R. has become an incredibly popular beach destination, but to see the agricultural economy at work, head inland and upland to tour a cacao farm.

Tour: Cacao Chocolate Tours, guided by team members from Rizek Cacao, bring you to La Esmeralda, where you can follow the cacao journey, from planting to processing. Or go with one of the island’s many tour operators to visit a farm affiliated with Conacado, the D.R.’s national confederation of cacao producers, to taste raw cacao and hot chocolate.

Walk: The capital city of Santo Domingo is a late-night kind of place. The time zone is an hour later than the East Coast, and that fact, combined with the Latin culture, means restaurants and clubs don’t get going until eight or nine or ten, and you’ll hear merengue music blasting until well past midnight. Stroll down the pedestrian Calle el Conde in the amazingly preserved, super clean, pedestrian-friendly Colonial Zone, a waterfront enclave of sixteenth-century homes, churches, historic sites, boutiques, restaurants, and hotels.

Shop: Artists set up their wares right on the Calle el Conde, bright paintings of island life, carvings, weavings, and more. Also in Santo Domingo, check out Kah Kow, a charming chocolate boutique with two locations, owned by Rizek, that sells chocolate bars made on the island from local cacao, as well as hot chocolate, T-shirts, soap, prints of famous local buildings done in a beautiful impressionistic style, and an adorable stuffed cacao pod toy called Poddy. You can also sign up for a fifteen-minute make-your-own-chocolate session.

Eat: In Santo Domingo, you can find Dominican food at various restaurants. For something lighter, check out Time Vegetarian Kitchen in the Colonial Zone, which bakes olive oil rolls to order and makes huge “pizzas”—crisp shells with Caesar salad on top.

Stay: Hodelpa Nicolas Ovando is an incredibly romantic hotel in the Colonial Zone that is listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Rooms are in three stone houses built in 1502, which are connected by patios and walkways and include the original home of the town’s founder, Governor Nicolás de Ovando. It’s a popular local spot for weddings that go late into the night; if merengue music in the courtyard will keep you up, drop by for drinks or dinner rather than checking in.

Nestlé is focusing on reducing labor exploitation, particularly of children, in the supply chain through its Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System. This program is part of Nestlé’s 2030 goal to help improve the livelihoods of thirty million people in communities directly connected to its business activities. Nestlé UK also released a report in response to the UK Modern Slavery Act, detailing its efforts to fight both adult and child exploitation in its chocolate supply chain, as well as in its other categories, like fishing.

Nestlé is also focusing on women’s economic empowerment in the cacao industry and in its own leadership, which I find particularly heartening. The company has partnered with the Fair Labor Association to boost women’s roles in Côte d’Ivoire, for example, and to offer training in new skills to diversify income in Ecuador and Venezuela. According to Nestlé CSR reports, in 2016 the company helped more than one thousand women develop income-generating side activities in Côte d’Ivoire.

Mars, a privately owned, $35 billion corporation that sells M&M’S, Snickers, Twix, and Dove, among other chocolate-based treats, has pledged $1 billion toward its own cacao sustainability efforts. Called Sustainable in a Generation, this climate-action initiative aims to reduce the company’s carbon footprint—including that of suppliers—by more than 60 percent by 2050, and to entirely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from its direct operations by 2040. Sustainable in a Generation also focuses on water stewardship, land management, and improving the lives of the million or so people in the Mars supply chain.

As Barry Parkin, Mars’s chief sustainability officer, recently said, “There are obviously commitments the world is leaning into but, frankly, we don’t think we’re getting there fast enough collectively.” Mars is also working with the Innovative Genomics Institute, a research lab at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop a cacao hybrid that can withstand climate change.

In 2017, the nonprofit environmental advocacy and action group Mighty Earth launched an extensive investigation into cacao farming in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and released a report revealing the negative environmental impact. Following this campaign—and international media coverage of it—twenty-four of the world’s leading cocoa companies signed a pact to end deforestation in the region. Godiva, for example, promised to roll out a cross-commodity zero-deforestation policy, including in cacao. In February 2018, Hershey announced its commitment to buying 100 percent zero-deforestation cacao, effective immediately.

MADE IN HAWAII: THE UNITED STATES GETS IN ON CACAO FARMING

Like coffee in California, cacao can also be grown in the United States. This is the vision of Dylan Butterbaugh, the young owner of Manoa Chocolate Hawaii, a bean-to-bar chocolate company that began in 2010.

Growing up in Hawaii, Butterbaugh was obsessed with surfing. He traveled the world in search of the world’s best waves. In college, he double-majored in sustainable development and Spanish, but was still more focused on surfing than on much else.

In his senior year, he started to think about his future and what he might want to do with his degree. He met someone at the university who was studying cacao as a potential agricultural product to grow in Hawaii. Butterbaugh was excited by the idea of supporting Hawaiian agriculture through a product that brings so much happiness. He started watching YouTube videos about the chocolate-making process and experimenting with making it at home. He and his friends rigged chocolate-making equipment from household items, and recorded their efforts in some pretty hilarious videos. You can see him roasting cacao beans over a gas barbecue grill in his parents’ yard, and working a pedal-powered winnowing machine made from a bicycle and a back massager. “We built everything for hundreds of dollars,” he says.

Butterbaugh looks like a young tech-preneur crossed with a surfer. He wears his thick, brown hair cut short and parted on the side, and moves with a bouncy, energetic, athletic gait. He has a youthful voice and an enthusiasm that makes you want to buy his bars.

Like me, his chocolate-eating background was mostly Hershey’s milk chocolate. Unlike me, he didn’t love it. But while learning about the field, he discovered craft dark chocolate and became hooked.

He started his first factory with a $15,000 bank loan and a Kickstarter campaign that generated $19,000 more. Manoa officially opened in 2012. It’s a great example of how possible it is today for someone with no real experience to get into this industry and make a difference while doing so.

Today, Manoa has twenty-one employees and operates a factory, tasting room, and retail store in Oahu, and a second retail store in the Hyatt hotel in Waikiki. Manoa sources from Hawaii as well as from other countries, and makes single-origin bars and “inclusion bars,” with ingredients such as sea salt, lavender, coffee, and cocoa nibs.

Because the labor and land costs are so high in Hawaii, local beans are very expensive. Manoa pays the high price or gets cacao beans from farmers, makes chocolate with them, and then pays the farmers through profits from the bars. This revenue share model generates three to four times more income for farmers than selling raw beans.

Butterbaugh’s main passion today is continuing to build a new industry in his home state. “I love what it can become. That you can take a fruit tree that grows here, make a high-end, value-added product, and export it all over the world. The bigger we get, the more fruit trees get planted.”

The sugar industry in Hawaii has really dried up, and Butterbaugh sees chocolate as the island’s next big crop. “I compare it to Napa Valley, which is also really expensive, but is covered in grapevines because they’re selling wine, not grapes. We can add value to the crop and create a finished chocolate bar, which makes the process work here.” He also looks to wine as a model in terms of respecting the varietal and terroir. His vision is to create a market for Hawaiian beans as a specific flavor, and then market the bars as the first made-and-grown-in-America chocolate. “We’re obsessed with making excellent chocolate in an ethical way.”

As a lifelong lover of all these established brands, I find the move toward supply-chain transparency in Big Chocolate particularly sweet. As King puts it, “Business is one of the gateways to solving larger social issues, partly because of the perpetual funding. If you know a product you are buying is supporting a program you care about, you know money is flowing in for that issue. The consumer world is changing. Transparency is becoming ubiquitous. All companies are learning to give the consumer what they want and deserve.”

For us as consumers, we can help in so many ways (such as by eating more chocolate) and by continuing to ask how our products are being made. Whether we choose to make our impact through chocolate, or coffee, or artisan enterprise, we all have a part in building great industries, and helping rebuild the ones we love.

Of course, just as the problems of the world can seem overwhelming, so can attempting to change every single thing you buy. None of us can do everything. If you can find one area to work on through your purchasing power, you are part of the solution. I’m so excited to watch as the benefits for all of us unfold.