Ecuador’s sustainable, local practices have helped the country make a cacao comeback—and chocolate lovers can share in the sweet rewards.. Ecuador sits on a gold mine of cacao. In its 19th-century heyday, the country was the world’s leading exporter, but plant disease and global market changes cost Ecuador its top spot in the early 1900s. Recent years, though, have seen the country make a chocolate comeback—thanks to local farmers, sustainably minded businesses, and (before travel restrictions) an influx of foodie tourists. The nation is now famous for its single-origin chocolate. Such production is time consuming and laborious; it’s done mostly by individual growers working on small-scale farms. During the global coronavirus pandemic, these small farmers have been made more vulnerable. But there’s unity and resilience within the cacao supply chain. In Ecuador, private and government initiatives have helped aid the transport of cacao to export and offered financial support to farmers. “Single-origin chocolate put Ecuador on the map,” says Santiago Peralta, co-founder of the organic chocolate company Pacari, which was launched as a way to preserve Ecuador’s native Arriba Nacional cacao variety. “It would be simpler to buy from a few of Ecuador’s biggest producers, but it’s the smaller, Indigenous farmers who contribute to the world’s genetic bank of cacao,” Peralta says. “That’s what we want: to preserve species and learn about varietals. We have 20 years of work ahead to understand the flavors alone.”

Small scale, big flavor

Cacao, the tree from which chocolate is derived, is part of the pungent, densely sprouting life force in the rainforest-carpeted slopes of Santa Rita, a small community in Ecuador’s northwestern Amazon. It’s a place rich with potential—if you have the know-how. Increasingly, Ecuador knows how. In recent years the ways in which farms in Santa Rita produce cacao have changed dramatically. “Fifteen years ago, people thought fine Ecuadorian cacao was lost,” Peralta says. “Farmers were paid poorly to produce bulk cacao for mass export—a mono-crop culture. But, as you can see, this is the biodiverse motherlode of indigenous crops.” (Related: Here’s the real story of how chocolate originated.) At Santa Rita’s maloca (community headquarters), village head Bolívar Alvarado offers an infusion of guayusa, the caffeine-laden plant that fuels Ecuador’s Amazon population and flavors some of Pacari’s chocolate bars. Alvarado leads tours of the chacra (horticultural plot), where visitors learn about Amazonian life and its native cacao, with short treks through rolling tracts of forest and informal tastings of the finished product. “When we started in 2002, my wife, Carla, and I had no connections or clue about farming,” said Peralta. “We learned alongside the farmers, designing equipment to better ferment and grind cacao beans. It gave us a real understanding of how production affects flavors. We began getting fantastic quality.” Pacari developed the country’s first tree-to-bar, single-origin organic chocolate, among other acclaimed offerings. Single-origin chocolate is often synonymous with sustainability and fair trade. But, in cacao-producing countries worldwide, this can often be far from the case. You may be able to trace the chocolate back to a single country, region, or even specific farm, but farmers may still find themselves paid poorly for hard-won produce. Even fair-trade agreements can leave farmers working with subsistence income; base market rates rarely fund investments in improving quality, yield, or crop diversity.