Bringing Chocolate Back to Its Roots

Los Angeles-based bean-to-bar chocolate store ChocoVivo sources not only its cacao from Tabasco, Mexico, but also its chocolate-processing methods: Following a 2,000-year-old tradition, it grinds the cacao with lava stones, helping the chocolate retain its purity and nutritional value. 

At Providence, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hollywood, executive pastry chef Mac Daniel Dimla leads a zero-waste bean-to-dessert chocolate program. After receiving fermented and dried beans directly from a plantation in Hawaii, he uses the nibs for chocolate and the husk for both a tea and mulch for the restaurant’s garden. He’s also currently developing a chocolate stout.

The two pioneers are leading Southern California’s push toward a sustainable chocolate movement. As the global chocolate industry grapples with deforestation and its contributions to climate change, Tsai and Dimla hope to take chocolate back to its sustainable origins.

“We want to get to that point where sustainable practices become normal,” Dimla says.

The Problem with Chocolate 

Some say that Tabasco is the birthplace of cacao. Although the first cacao tree was found in the Amazonian basin, it wasn’t until the trade route brought cacao to Mesoamerica, particularly during the Mayan period, that it flourished, becoming so valuable that cacao beans were even used as currency.

You can still find Mayan artifacts in the ground near the Jesus Maria Plantation, the 29-acre cacao farm in Tabasco where ChocoVivo sources its chocolate. At the nearby ancient temples, chocolate was used ceremoniously. 

These days, chocolate is grown only about 20 degrees north and south of the equator, and 70% of cacao comes from Africa. Cacao farmers are struggling with everything from unfair wages to drought and deforestation. All of it threatens the industry’s future. 

As global demand for chocolate has risen, farmers have struggled to keep up, often resorting to cutting down rainforests to make way for more cacao trees. In the Ivory Coast, it’s estimated that 70% of the country’s deforestation can be attributed to cocoa farming, according to the World Wildlife Fund. A 2019 U.K. study of chocolate’s climate impact estimated that an average 40-gram bar of milk chocolate has a carbon footprint of 200 grams.

Big-name chocolate companies, from Nestlé to Hershey’s, have been linked to contributing to deforestation and loss of critical biodiversity. 

“Maybe in 30 years, the question will be, will you have enough trees to support our love of chocolate?” ChocoVivo founder Patricia Tsai says. “When beans are three times the price of what they were last year, it's something to be said that there is trouble in the industry.”

Through ChocoVivo, Tsai hopes to look toward chocolate’s future.

“How can we change this perspective of what sustainability means?” Tsai says. “I hope that our conversation in the next five years … is about how we really made a positive impact on the industry itself.”

ChocoVivo offers premium products, and they’ve charged $10 for their bars for the past six years. But this year, prices will increase to account for inflation and rising costs of cacao, Tsai says.

More food-industry businesses will have to adopt sustainable methods if chocolate’s future is to be secure, Dimla says. But there is still a ways to go before sustainable practices become more commonplace in restaurants, he adds, pointing to cost as the largest barrier. 

“Knowing that this industry is one of the biggest contributors to climate change . . . that makes me want to dive into more of the stuff that I do,” Dimla says. “I have a responsibility to kind of cancel out the amount of waste that we produce, the amount of carbon emissions that we as a restaurant industry put out there.”

Direct From the Source

To Tsai, sourcing directly from Mexico, where cacao has sacred and historic roots, and using ancient practices to process it, is what makes her business and product sustainable. ChocoVivo’s process is a stark contrast to the methods often employed by larger companies.

Although pesticides are commonly used by cacao farmers — harming the surrounding water, soil, air, and wildlife — at the 100-year-old Tabasco plantation, the trees are protected with a natural pesticide of garlic, vinegar, water, and copper. Unlike large industrial manufacturers, which typically ferment their beans for several days, requiring additional processing to remove the extra acidity, ChocoVivo’s beans are specially fermented for two to three days, then dried in the sun. 

To produce the final product, lava stones are used to grind the cacao nibs — no extra cacao butter, flavorings or soy lecithin are added at any point.

Not only does working directly with an individual farm yield a higher quality — and more delicious — chocolate, Tsai and Dimla say, but it also creates a sustainable product in an industry facing a slew of challenges. 

While many farmers earn less than a dollar a day — leading to issues like the use of child labor — with direct trade, which eliminates intermediaries, farmers earn 50% to 300% more than the market price of commodity cacao, while providing a quality product for chocolate makers. This is a separate process from fair trade, which involves a specific certification that can be costly for some farmers to acquire but doesn’t necessarily ensure a high-quality product or ethical practices. 

Both Tsai and Dimla emphasize that making chocolate sustainable means more than just paying farmers fairly. It means deep knowledge of the growing process and strong relationships with the people who cultivate the crop.

“Every month or so we talk to [the farmer] about what's going on, how much cacao we're going to need in the next year or the next couple of months, how's the weather going,” Dimla says. 

ChocoVivo used to manufacture its own chocolate after purchasing the beans from the plantation. Due to both high labor costs and its strong relationship with the grower, the company shifted production to the farm, as well. 

Although large companies like Hershey’s and Nestlé are able to keep prices low for consumers, it comes at a large cost, Tsai says. 

“If you empower these small farmers,” Tsai says, “not only are you going to increase a higher wage for the farmers, more sustainability, but you take the power away from the power players.”

Dimla sees power shifting toward the smaller farms. Although most restaurants don’t make their own chocolate like Providence does, he says that over the past few years, more large restaurant supply brands have become increasingly conscious about where they’re sourcing their cacao from. Moreover, more and more restaurants have emphasized sustainability in the past decade, particularly in Los Angeles, he says.

“They're putting the word out there that for this industry to have a future, that's something that we should be considering when we're sourcing our cacao,” Dimla says. “That's where our power lies, right? Our purchasing power.” 

Education Is Key

Educating more consumers about sustainable chocolate is key, Tsai says, although progress has certainly been made since she first entered the industry around 15 years ago. Back then, she says, many consumers didn’t even know that cacao is a plant.

Now, schools teach where cacao comes from, and even Netflix produced a show highlighting the chocolate industry, she says.

“You can only hope that, little by little, all of those things — even though you might not have an immediate impact — you can see people's palates changing,” she says. 

Every little bit of information, whether it’s about cacao percentages or just checking where a chocolate bar is from before buying, makes a meaningful difference, she says.

“Chocolate is truly food, it is not confectioner candy,” she says. 

Although it will take much more time and effort for the chocolate industry to truly leave its sustainability issues behind, at ChocoVivo, Tsai hopes to take customers back to chocolate’s roots. 

At ChocoVivo’s Culver City store, customers have the opportunity to taste chocolate the way it was intended — by learning about chocolate’s history and traditional uses. Tsai recollected a recent children’s tour at ChocoVivo, which involved not only a tour of the space and history of chocolate, but a mindfulness meditation activity using chocolate.

As she played music filled with monkey and bird sounds meant to transport them to the jungle, some kids were restless, while others became immersed in the meditation.

When they opened their eyes and were asked what they saw in the rainforest, Tsai recalled one child who she will never forget.

“He said, ‘I saw five rows with 10 birds,’ and I'm like, ‘Wow, that's very specific,’” she says, laughing.

“Every little moment that you can use chocolate in the way that it was used historically, I think inches us closer to … really honoring it,” Tsai says.