Today we finished our company site visits by going Sibö Chocolate for a chocolate history and tasting tour from when the indigenous people would make a cocoa drink to modern day techniques of making godforsaken white “chocolate”. Sibö Chocolate was started in 2008 by two men, historian Julio Fernandez Amón and journalist George Soriano, who quit their day jobs and went to Europe to study with Chocolate masters, so they could develop a company that not only focused on premium gourmet chocolates and being profitable, but also made a point to focus on sustainable practices including absolutely no plastic packaging, community funding and involvement, history tours, and small farm sourcing. The is the relationship between coffee and chocolate is interesting because both are natural stimulants and are both produced most massively in the opposite countries to which they are native. Coffee originated in Africa and is now more heavily produced in the Americas and chocolate is the opposite with nearly 70% of all chocolate being grown in Africa while it originated in the Americas. Coffee is a stimulant because it contains caffeine and Chocolate is a stimulant because it contains theobromine.
The cocoa supply chain isn’t often talked or worried about but its biggest issue/challenge is the fact that, like coffee, for a long time the high quality product was shipped abroad to countries who would roast them for coffee or grind them down for chocolate and then sold off associated to that countries name, ex: Belgian chocolate, which takes away revenue or incentive or a special Costa Rican cocoa or cocoa grower and decentivises the entire industries. What producers like Cafe Britt for coffee and Sibö for Chocolate are doing is bring back that brand and that identity to the Costa Rican people who can be proud of the high quality product that they themselves produced.
If I was to start a company it would be a cocoa company because it is a sustainable rainforest fruit and I like chocolates.
P.S my host family came up with my title…. they were quite proud of it.