Original Beans – Arhuaco, Colombia, Dark 82%

About the bar

This intense dark chocolate bar has a sherbet-like aroma that runs into notes of fruit and hazelnut. Hints of sweet spice, liquorice, and sesame round off the finish as this delightfully smooth chocolate melts in your mouth.

About the maker

Original Beans was founded in 2008 by Philipp Kauffmann, a former conservationist at the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations, to be a regenerative chocolate making company that focuses on protecting farmers, the rainforest, and thousands of endangered species. Their One Bar : One Tree programme promises that a tree is planted every time an Original Beans bar is sold, which can be tracked on their website with a special code on the back of the packet.

The beans

To make this bar, Original Beans travelled to the ancestral lands of the Arhuaco tribe, which was long famed for its cocoa production but has been ravaged in the past centuries by colonialism and conflict. The Arhuaco have now returned to their lands, where they are practicing ancient tribal cacao-making traditions designed to preserve nature’s harmony. This bean, now named Businchari – meaning “new beginning” – is an ancient variety of cacao that had been almost completely exterminated by foreign settlers.  And the bar also has an extraordinary story that really shows Jan, and the Original Bean team, commitment to environmentalism.

Jan, a cacao enthusiast at Original Beans, received a rare invitation from the Arhuaco tribe to visit their villages and engage with their spiritual leaders back in the mid 2010s. This was a remarkable privilege, as the Arhuaco have a history of fiercely guarding their land against unwelcome intrusions from conquistadors, settlers, guerrilla groups, paramilitary forces, tomb raiders, and most recently, disrespectful tourists.

Getting there wasn’t easy — surrounded by the unspoiled beauty of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia, reaching the Arhuaco tribe is no easy feat even for Jan, an experienced traveller. It took him an eight-hour motorcycle journey through serpentine dirt roads, navigating muddy trails and crossing rivers on aging wooden rafts to access the heart of their territory and cocoa grove. There, he found a unique and ancient cacao variety, known as ‘Businchari’ (symbolizing sunrise and new beginnings) by the Arhuaco people.

In 2015, Jan first travelled to the Katansama village, where he met with Mamo Kamilo, a respected spiritual elder of the tribe. Jan shared the story of Original Beans and emphasized the company’s use of bio-compostable wrapping and foil for their chocolate. Mamo Kamilo tested this claim by cutting the materials into small pieces and burying them in the soil, promising to reconnect with Jan in three months if the claim held true.  Fortunately for us, the packaging really is biodegradeable.  And so it was under an ancient tree, a revered gathering spot for the community, that the collaboration between Original Beans and the Arhuaco tribe commenced.

Since then, Original Beans has been committed to improving the livelihood of the Arhuaco people by empowering them to cultivate high-quality cacao in harmony with their rainforest habitat and preserving their precious cacao – and delicious – heritage.

Allergens*

May contain cereals containing gluten, may contain peanuts, may contain milk, may contain nuts

Ingredients

Cacao mass 83% (colombia), raw cane sugar 17% (paraguay)

*Allergen advice: We directly import, and purchase, all products from independent makers and have these shipped by our partner warehouse (which is not certified allergen-free), and so we cannot guarantee that any product will be allergen-free. Even where an allergen is not listed, products may have been produced, shipped, or stored in facilities which handle allergens.

If you would like further information about a specific product, please contact us on [email protected] or contact the maker directly.