Suitable for drinking and baking, our cacao is also ideal for chocolate making, whether you’re chocolate making at home for fun, or fine tuning your own brand of chocolate for the next vegan market.

As with any pure cacao, it has a naturally bitter taste and may need a sweetener (see our Coconut Palm Sugar, Stevia Powder and Lacuma Powder for natural sweetener alternatives).

Our Criollo cacao beans are grown in the Peruvian Amazon, the spiritual home of cacao.

Enjoyed by locals long before they shared its secrets with the outside world, cacao and Peru have an intertwined history. Almost all of Peru’s cacao is grown by small holders who rely on a weekly harvest (April – September) as their main source of income. Their crop is sold to cooperatives who act as intermediaries. It's then processed in Peru before it’s trucked to Lima and exported to the UK.

Environmental impact

Peruvian cacao is grown sustainably amongst trees or shrubs, using an agroforestry land management system. This method has much less environmental impact than the fertiliser-heavy plantations that are common in West Africa and which cause so much deforestation.