Meet the maker
Raphio Chocolate
About Raphio Chocolate
Established in 2016, Raphio Chocolate was born from husband-and-wife team Yohanes and Elisia, who make their craft chocolate bars in Fresno, California with their small team of 5 strong. Their mission? To focus on quality – no cutting corners, no fillers, and using the best ingredients possible for any chocolate they make. The name ‘Raphio’ is a combination of the names of their children, Raphael and Rio, which is part of the reason why Yohanes and Elisia strive for the best – they believe in the health benefits that come with real chocolate, and sell the same chocolate that they feed to their children.
Elisia and her two young children, Raphael and Rio.
Yohanes and Elisia were born and raised in Indonesia, which is where a lot of their passion for chocolate stems from. Yohanes has been a practising civil engineers for 20+ years, designing and building life-changing products. With deforestation to plant palm oil trees in a monoculture system, Yohanes believes he can build something even more impactful and change more lives for the better with regenerative cacao farming in Indonesia. The pair also often visit their families in Indonesia, and visit cacao farms while they’re there – it’s their goal to one day important these Indonesian beans to make more of their single-origin chocolate.
How they became makers…
Yohanes and Elisia got into chocolate by accident – literally. In 2014, Yohanes and his football buddy (who is also Indonesian) were looking for Indonesian cacao, but discovered it wasn’t available in the US for retail or wholesale. They found out there was a red tape imposed by the US government through FDA, called Import Alert 34-01 – long story short, importers have to go through a very risky process to perform additional testing before the border releases the imported cacao, and there’s a high probability that the US government could audit and reject the third-party lab test (which happened to Yohanes’ shipment in 2024).
In 2014, the pair did 2 small trial imports and were successful. The quality for the first two shipments was good, but the 3rd order, which was significantly bigger than the first 2 orders, contained subpar quality beans. The pair tried to sell them to the US craft chocolate makers, but to no avail, and the bean quality started deteriorating over a period of months as they were just sitting in an empty warehouse.
Yohanes’ partner was ready to throw in the towel but Elisia, Yohanes’ wife, was adamant to try and transform the beans themselves. Elisia took a small amount of cacao home, and roasted them in her oven – and they’ve not looked back since.
Raphio’s Sourcing
Raphio source their cocoa beans from the Ebier Suth Cokran Cooperative in the West Papua province of Indonesia via boat. The cooperative’s mission is to rehabilitate the abandoned cacao farm, established 40+ years ago, to create sustainable jobs and growth in the rural community.
The main crop is typically harvested during the May to September months, and the mid crop is harvested from October to January. Due to global warming, Indonesian farmers that Yohanes and Elisia have talked to report that their harvest seasons have shifted about 1-2 months earlier or later, depending on climate.
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