Cacao cultivation by variety
WE SET OUT TO CHANGE AN OLD AND INDUSTRIALIZED INDUSTRY
For centuries, cacao farmers and chocolate makers didn't talk properly to each other. They lived in separate worlds, literally. Separated by thousands of miles, because cacao is grown in the tropics and chocolate is made in temperate climates. The farmers never knew what their cacao tasted like when it was transformed into chocolate, and the chocolate makers never knew much about cacao farming.
CACAO IS A FRUIT
cacao is a fruit tree - like an apple tree - and most of the principles of growing fruit trees are therefore the same for cacao.
The first principle is to plant the trees for the flavor and variety of its fruits, and this is possible by the principle of grafting. Nowadays, all orchards are planted in this way, except for cacao.
Grafting
To be able to plant for the variety, just like for fruit trees, it is necessary to use the technique of grafting following a careful selection of cacao for the flavor of the fruit. The origin of this technique goes back to the Romans, 2,000 years ago, when they began to select apple varieties. Previously, when apples were wild, no one ate them.
Today, there are more than 7000 varieties of apples. The grafting technique has since been applied to all fruits (cherries, pears, grapes, etc.), except for cacao. We started by carefully selecting the best varieties for their natural flavors. With one selected tree, we could graft a hundred new saplings and obtain an exceptional cacao.
Once the trees started producing buds, we were able to graft more. Little by little, we managed to obtain a few thousand new saplings thanks to the grafting that we started to plant in order to harvest the cacao by variety.
PRINCIPLES OF AGRICULTURE
The principles of cultivation are similar to those of all other fruit trees. Some of the most important elements of cacao cultivation are as follows: Pruning is essential to encourage the tree to produce fruit, instead of growing tall and sturdy.
Pruning also keeps the tree low (less than 2.5 meters high) and balanced. The goal is 3-4 producing branches, or 10 meters of producing branches. The harvest objective is 22 to 30 fruits per tree per calendar year. On average, 22 pods yield one kilo of cacao, which corresponds approximately to 1 kilo of 70% dark chocolate couverture. As a general rule, 2 to 3 pods give a 100g chocolate bar.
This is the key to improving the taste of chocolate. It all starts with exploring the countryside of the producing countries, looking for the cacao with the best taste potential.
We traveled through the jungles of Central America, tasting the beans from the trees we discovered. It took us more than a year to search, evaluate and select the varieties with the best potential. We found the best cacao deep in the jungle, often from a small number of similar trees with the same flavor profile.
