Meet the maker
Belvie
Want to visit Belvie in Vietnam?
Head to La Belvie shop at 84 Ly Tu Trong street, district 1, Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. Opening hours: 9am-10pm everyday. Belvie source their beans from Lam Dong, Dong Nai, Tien Giang and Ben Tre.
Questions and Answers with Belvie Chocolate Makers
Tell us a little about how it all started.
First, as we are chocolate addicts and living in the south of Vietnam where fine Trinitario trees are growing next to the door, we started making our own chocolate and slowly came the idea to share our passion with the rest of the world. Secondly, understanding the cacao plantations in Vietnam are in a decline, and being from a Vietnamese farmers family we decided to do something on this by producing a high end product next to the plantations and by the same time helping the planters with a decent income as we buy the beans directly at an above fair trade price.
What is your mission in the chocolate world?
Our mission is to make fine tree to bar, bean to bar chocolate with as ingredient only cacao beans and cane sugar and some cacao butter from the same origin. We are not using Soya or any other lecithin. Regarding the process of making chocolate we want to make chocolate from each terroir in Vietnam. Only single terroir dark chocolate. We found the terroir is very important in the development of the flavour of the final chocolate. Our mission is also to develop the cacao plantations in South Vietnam in order to preserve the farmers to cut the cacao trees and give them a more than reasonable income.
How did you start ‘Belvie’?
Belvie chocolate was cofounded end 2015 by Ms Jannie Ha Tran (Vietnamese) and Marc Vanborren (Belgian) and actually 5 persons are involved in running the company but we hope soon to hire more people.
Where do you source your cocoa beans from?
We source our beans directly at the farms. As the plantations in Vietnam are small (between 1 and 2 ha) we hunt for a few farmers with quality beans on the same terroir and we develop and follow up the plantation and the post harvest fermentation and drying together. We don’t work with cooperatives or middle man as we only want beans from a same terroir. We are also proud to offer the planters a much higher price than Fair Trade.
Where do you make your chocolate?
Our chocolaterie is located in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) between the two main cacao plantation regions: the Mekong Delta with the famous Ben Tre and Tien Giang Province, and the Central Highland with the Lam Dong and Dong Nai provinces. After we collect the beans at the farms, they are resorted by size and separated from any foreign materials and flat and bad beans in the factory, then bagged and stored in 50kg jute bags until roasting.
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