Guardians of Flavor: Ecuador’s Cacao Nacional Farmers and the Future of Fine Chocolate
“When I first started baking brownies, I looked for cacao, but I could only find bulk cacao, and that wasn’t any good,” says Barbara Wilson, the founder of Mindo Chocolate Makers. “I heard fine chocolate makers use Ecuadorian cacao beans. But if Ecuador has them, why couldn’t I find them here?”
Barbara and Jose took a month-long trip through Ecuador to source the best coffee and cacao beans, and after visiting many farms, they finally found a farmers cooperative that had what they were looking for. Once Barbara roasted the beans and baked her brownies, she was stunned. “It was the best chocolate I ever tasted,” she recalls, “I was mad we were eating all this nasty chocolate, when there is good chocolate out there.”
When she started making her first batches, Barbara was new to the world of chocolate. She was a coffee-aficionado, and took the same nerdiness she had for coffee–researching, collecting data, taking workshops—and applied it to chocolate. She followed courses and trainings, attended conferences at Salon du Chocolat, talked with experts from Chocolate Makers of America, collaborated with scientific researchers, and got De Vries (from De Vries Chocolate) to visit them as a consultant and assist them. Barbara was keen on sharing this knowledge with the farmers on the ground in order to optimize the fermentation process, an essential part in awakening the large array of flavors that lie dormant in Nacional cacao beans.
“When we first started working with a farmers cooperative, they didn’t ferment the cacao beans, and they were drying them on the ground," says Barbara. “So we worked with them to start fermenting in boxes and drying in covered beds under the sun. This improved the quality of the beans and we started paying farmers triple the market price to ensure high standards. In the end, we found good suppliers, but it wasn’t easy. We had to work hard.”
Barbara’s work over the span of a decade shows how relatively new and niche the knowledge behind making high-quality craft chocolate is. But this labor intensity and know-how is often-times not taken into account when fairing in the price paid for chocolate according to George Fletcher, the manager of EcoCacao and UOPROCAE, two fine aroma cacao associations located in Ecuador’s Pacific Coast.
“In order to have good quality chocolate, we need to make sure that the whole chain operates well,” George tells us. “The very first step is using a single variety of cocoa, so there are no blends with hybrids or clone varieties like CCN-51. We (farmers) all harvest on the same day and we make sure there are no impurities, no pieces of cobs or mold. It’s all very hygienic. It’s important that the cacao pods are all picked on the same day because the fermentation starts the day you open them, or they won’t ferment. Then we follow fermentation protocols, which over the course of four days and at least three turnings, will develop the flavours that cacao intrinsically has.”
Want to know more about the cacao fermentation process? Read here.
Once fermented, cacao is sun-dried on a rack, George explains, which can take more or less time, depending on the weather. To know the cacao is ready to be shipped to buyers, they measure the humidity and fermentation level in a laboratory, and even make 100 percent cacao liqueur bars to test for flavour.
“All of this means a lot of work and a lot of pressure on the producers and those who work in the collection centers,” says George who is a cacao farmer himself, “but this is not reflected in the price.”
The association UOPROCAE collects cacao from five different farmers' collectives that represent 450 families that work exclusively with Cacao Nacional across the tropical forests of Esmeraldas. They use agroforestry farming systems over monoculture farming, meaning they privilege sustainability and biodiversity over high-scale productivity. As an association they have a singular organic certification, collection center, and directory board which allows farmers to save hugely on costs, have overarching regulations and supervision for quality control, and they can make sure they keep a singular fixed price for their cocoa beans.
Despite the seeming benefits of these farmer associations, they are rare for cacao producers in Ecuador. While more than 80% of cocoa production is in the hands of smallholder farmers, who make up a population of roughly 185,000, only 17 percent of them belong to agricultural associations. That means the rest depends directly on intermediaries. Intermediation is carried out by an estimated 4600 people. They buy cacao directly from farmers, take the beans to collections centers, and then transport them to the port city of Guayaquil for export. When farmers aren’t in charge of this part of the chain themselves, as in the case of UOPROCAE, they lose a significant chunk of potential earnings and are vulnerable to prices set and speculated by intermediaries.
Prior to the current cacao crisis, intermediaries and associations didn’t compete much against one another, says George. “We paid more, much more than merchants. We weren't competitors before because we were on a different scale. Farmers were happy since we paid 20 percent more, as long as it was Nacional, organic, and clean.”
But once Ghana and Ivory Coast, who made up close to 70 percent of global cacao production, were hit by a storm of mass drought and political instability, cacao supply tanked and prices skyrocketed. In March of last year, cocoa on the New York stock market reached $10.000 per ton.
Since cacao is a commodity traded on the stock market, its price goes up and down according to the flux of supply and demand. But unlike corn or wheat, the price of cacao is volatile. Since cacao only grows in tropical regions on, and slightly around, the Equator, cacao production is confined to small parts of the world. External factors like drought, floods, fungal diseases, plagues, and political instability in any of these regions can hugely impact cacao production, and make its price go up.
“Now the price difference we are able to pay farmers doesn't reach more than 10 percent,” George tells us, “so now more and more cacao producers are choosing to sell to merchants and are no longer loyal to the association.”
In the absence of a premium price paid for Nacional Cacao beans, the temptation to grow its clone variety CCN-51 becomes bigger. This latter variety, introduced in the Ecuadorian market in the 80’s as a disease-resistant and high-yielding super crop is meant to satisfy the industrial-scale hunger for cacao while ditching aside flavor complexity, ancestral genetics, and sustainability.
When middlemen buy cacao from farmers, they barely do quality-controls, don’t distinguish between Cacao Nacional and CCN-51, and have no vested interest on whether the cacao is organically-grown, according to George.
“Farmers are massively replacing Cacao Nacional for CCN-51 because the price merchants pay is the same,” says George. “We have members from the association who are cutting down Cacao Nacional trees and have left the organization. They now use agrochemicals and replace agroforestry with monocultivation. If this trend continues, the quality of cacao will not only drop,” George explains, “but I’m afraid that in a couple of years, Cacao Nacional will also likely disappear.”
George’s worries are reflected in how CCN-51 cacao now takes up nearly 90 percent of total cacao production in Ecuador.
Part of the problem is that fine aroma cacao like Cacao Nacional is used primarily by small and medium-size chocolate makers and chocolatiers who don’t manage large industrial-size volumes. It’s a niche market that can hardly compete with transnational chocolate companies who rely on commodity traders for steady supply and stable prices of their chocolate bars.
“Cacao has been more scarce,” says Emily Meza-Wilson, the CEO of Mindo Chocolate Makers, “it is difficult when we need to source a large amount at once because there is a limited supply of cocoa beans and there are buyers ready to buy it up fast. We used to have an advantage when buying cocoa beans, because we would pay triple the market price, but now that cacao is a globally traded commodity it is all sold at the same price regardless of the quality or genetics.”
The company was forced to raise the price from $10 to $12 per chocolate bar as a result of the crisis, although “if we were to increase the price of the bar as much as cacao has gone up, it would be more than $20 per bar,” adds Emily, “despite this, we have received some complaints about the price increases, but we try to explain what’s going on.”
The significant inroads Barbara Wilson and Jose Meza have made since the early 2000s to make sustainable, organic, flavor-rich chocolate that reasserts the unique value of Ecuador’s Cacao Nacional seem to shrink in the face of the current cacao crisis. When volatile market prices are pushing farmers to grow CCN-51 in monoculture systems, replacing quality for quantity to meet the global demands of the chocolate industry, there is a serious risk that sustainably-grown, genetically-diverse and flavor-rich cacao can become a thing of the past.
“That’s why it’s important that, if we want Cacao Nacional to survive, that chocolate makers and consumers continue to pay a premium price for our beans,” says George Fletcher, “instead of always trying to pay less, people should pay the most,” he adds.
“This will not only guarantee that cacao farmers can finally have the dignified life that they deserve,” he says “but also that ancestral, biodiverse, agroforestry farming can survive.”