COMMON GROUND CACAO

My chocolate journey… 

I think I have been surrounded by chocolate my whole life; I still can remember how as a little boy I used to help out at my family’s pastry shop on the outskirts of the northern port city of Hamburg in Germany. Coating little ‘Rum Balls’ in chocolate & chocolate flakes, helping with the yearly chocolate Christmas production, brushing our little tart shells with liquid chocolate.

Even back then in the 1980’s chocolate was a big part of the business, but I think my chocolate life really only kicked off when – straight after my 3-year pastry apprenticeship in Germany – I was, to my surprise hired as a chocolatier at the “Au Marron Glace” Pastry Shop in Lyon, France. Now, I know that they only took me under their wing since they felt pity for me. At the end of the day I decided to cycle on my bicycle to the interview from Hamburg to Lyon – a whopping 1140 km! I guess they didn’t have a choice when I arrived, so they threw me into the basement where the chocolate kitchen was, helping them to produce 1000 kg of hand-crafted chocolate confections during the busy winter season. Suddenly, there I was, 19 years young, in the food capital of France, living just a stone-throw away from culinary gods like Paul Bocuse, munching on flaky croissants on the early morning commute to work and experiencing all the culinary delights France had to offer.

The pastry career took off after that, and more then two decades as Executive Pastry Chef in some of the most renown hotels Scotland, the Middle East, China & Japan had to offer, before finally settling right here on the west coast of beautiful British Columbia. Chocolate was always readily available, one quick phone call to your local supplier and new shiny bags of either Belgian, French or Swiss chocolates would be delivered to your kitchen’s door step the next day, many times accompanied with a fancy-free recipe brochure or even free tools to ensure you continue to be loyalty to the brand. What was there to question? We have been told since the longest times that those European brands of chocolates are simply the best, right? 

As I matured as a Chef, the nagging question at the back of my head became louder and louder, questioning those assumptions and becoming more curious about who is really responsible for my food and where it really comes from. Considering what a commodity chocolate has become in these modern times, I felt like we are very far removed from the roots of where our food or in this case our chocolate comes from.

Everything changed for me in 2017 when I suddenly found myself walking along low growing chocolate trees on the Granja Luker Farm & Plantation close to the city of Manizales in the Andes mountains of Colombia in South America. The great Colombian Chocolate manufacturer Casa Luker was kind enough to invite me to their plant in Bogota to show me, and a few fellow Chefs around one of their cacao plantations in the Andes. And it affirmed to me what I already suspected, why do I have to buy my chocolate through European brands when it isn’t even grown in Europe? 

Experiencing and seeing the tremendous hard labour cacao farmers endure to produce on a yearly basis, and how they have to combat with an ever changing and more radical climate. Also the dedication the farmers have towards their crops made me promise to find a more supportive and sustainable way to use and make chocolate. Together with my wife, we opened the Pastry Training Centre of Vancouver in 2009 in East Vancouver, dedicating ourselves in training the next generation of young chefs or anybody even remotely curious about better quality pastry, bread & chocolate. So, it was an obvious decision to switch our school and production to be completely bean to bar.

Every morsel of chocolate used in our training kitchen or purchased through our storefront is produced in house from only the finest certified organic cacao beans, which we source through our friends “Amazon Specialities” which is located in Lima, Peru. Through them, we are able to obtain the finest cacao beans directly through various cacao-cooperatives located throughout remote parts of Peru. It is these cooperatives who not only ensure the high quality is maintained, but they also negotiate the sales prices for the contributing farmers to ensure that the mostly indigenous and female farmers receive their fair share. Thus ensuring a truly sustainable and ethical process. We have been lucky to meet some of these truly amazing female farmers in the remote jungle of Quillabamba in Peru, listening to their life stories and struggles they have faced. Knowing that we are able to support these farmers in Peru makes the hard work that we put into our chocolates worth it. 

And hard work it is, the bean to bar craft market is trending and getting more and more mainstream. And that is great as it hopefully creates more awareness about what chocolate is and where it comes from. Considering that 70% of the world’s cacao is coming from western Africa, where it is grown mostly in very questionable conditions and circumstances, we should know where our chocolate comes from.

We are spending consideringly more time in the kitchen, sorting the cacao beans, roasting them gently to each specific cacao bean profile before grinding them coarsely to remove the outer husk from the beans (available as our delicious cacao husk tea). The resulting cacao nibs are then stone-ground for a minimum of 48 hours with the addition of cane or panela sugar and occasionally with Canadian whole milk powder to produce our signature smooth chocolates. A true labour of love, connecting our finished chocolate & confections back to the folks who really deserve all the credit – the cacao farmers out there in the Jungle growing, harvesting and providing us with this amazing superfood mother nature has provided us with – the Cacao.

Indulge in our hand-crafted, award-winning bean-to-bar chocolate.

Right here in Vancouver BC…..