Our Cacao
CHOC Chick provides a range of CHOCtastic and sustainably sourced cacao ingredients and cacao blends that are perfect for making delicious vegan chocolate-based recipes, hot chocolates and smoothies. We want to share the goodness of the cocoa bean with everyone and offer minimally processed cacao that is CHOCfull of nutrients and free from dairy, sugar, gluten, palm oil, soya, additives, and guilt!
We have been importing cacao directly from Ecuador and Peru since 2009 and work with cooperatives of family farms that have been growing cacao sustainably for generations. Our cacao farmers are masters in the growing, fermentation and drying of the cocoa bean to ensure the quality, taste and safety of CHOC Chick cacao. Our beans are minimally processed to retain the natural goodness and all batches undergo microbiological testing to ensure they are completely free of harmful bacteria. We're also incredibly proud of the complete traceability of production of our cacao; we can trace each batch from the plantation to fermentation, drying and production. We love our cacao and hope you enjoy and love CHOC Chick cacao ingredients as much as we do!
Where does cacao come from?
It all starts with a beautiful small flower on the bark of the cocoa tree.
The flower grows and blossoms into a bud that over 3 months becomes a cocoa pod full of cacao seeds of pulp (each pod has around 50 seeds).
Once ripe, the cacao pod is picked, cut open and the seeds are removed. The shells are left to ferment the soil and other crops. Most of the plantations we source from grow a range of crops, from coffee, bananas, oranges to cacao and the shells and outer skins of all the crops are left to ferment the soil, adding to the unique flavour of the Nacional Arriba bean.
The seeds are then taken to the cacao collection centres where they are weighed, qualified and placed in the fermentation boxes. The fermentation process lasts 4 days and each day the fermenting beans are dropped to a lower box until the final box on the 4th day (the smell is intoxicating!).
The beans are raked through regularly with wooden rakes and you can tell how well the beans are drying by the sound they make. Our growers are experts at identifying when the beans are ready.
The beans are then taken to the production plant where they are flash roasted to remove any bacteria and compressed together to extract the cacao butter. The rest of the cocoa mass is then ground up to a fine powder with nothing else added.