Normally there’s a long and winding road from growing cacao to producing edible chocolate. Middlemen reap the lion’s share of the profits, paying farmers a pittance for their beans before shipping them to processing facilities around the world.
But in Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest, a group of Quechua families are tilting the economics of cacao cultivation in their own favor. In “When Chocolate is a Way of Life,” (The New York Times, Wednesday, November 5, 2008, pp. D1 and D8), Jill Santopietro tells how 850 Quechua families have formed the Kallari cooperative to sell their own home-grown, home-fermented beans directly to chocolate manufacturers. In the process they’ve raised the price they get per from 20 cents per pound to as much as $1.95.
One of the key outside players was Robert Steinberg, a founder of Scharffen Berger Chocolate in Berkeley, California, who died in September, 2008. Steinberg told the Quechua that before he could use their beans, “they needed to be properly fermented, a process that brings out fruit and floral flavors and reduces astringency.” After a consultant taught them to “create fermentation boxes and to monitor temperatures,” Steinberg presented a chocolate bar made with Kallari beans to Slow Food’s 2004 Terra Madre summit and later helped convince a Swiss manufacturer to purchase the cooperative’s product at the dramatically higher price of 94 cents per pound.
Now, with a $250,000 grant from Stephen McDonnell of Applegate Farms, Kallari has closed the loop by producing its own premium chocolate bars in a Quito factory. As Santopietro notes, the bars are made from “an unusual blend of cacaos that grow on Quechua land—fruity Cacao Amazonico, nutty Criollo, Forastero Amazonico, Tipo Trinitaria, and, most important, a rare variety that flourishes around their homes, Cacao Nacional.”
How does Kallari chocolate taste? According to Tomas Keme, a Swiss chocolate expert who has helped the Quechua, it has “a certain smell and taste that is herbal, flowery but also savory, like black pepper...It’s the same taste I find in a Californian cabernet.”
Santopietro describes the flavor as “smooth, rich and straightforward.” Kallari’s 2.47-ounce bars, in 75 and 85 percent cacao, are sold at some, but not all, Whole Foods markets.
Kallari is a Quechua word meaning "to begin" or "the early times."