A Heartfelt Letter From Ora Cacao Founder, Jonas
I’ve been thinking about when cacao first came into my life. It was May 2012 in Oaxaca Mexico, and I was patiently peeling one cacao bean after another and putting them into a colorful ceramic bowl. I was chatting with a Zapotec elder named Maria who was showing me the process that she had grown up with, and was still in awe of the aromas that had emerged from roasting the cacao beans on an open fire just a little while earlier. When I first put the cacao we made that day into my mouth, I knew that this was something that more people in the world wanted to experience. A connection to cacao that honors the peoples and lands where cacao comes from, and that is fully alive due to a gentle and intentional method of transforming it from seed to cup that keeps its wild essence intact.
That moment was but a seed: it was two more years before I took a leap of faith to start Firefly Chocolate, another two years before I started a website to share ceremonial cacao, yet another two years before I rigged our first tools to produce 100% cacao discs (my mechanical engineering degree did come in handy!), and then yet another two years before I began building the chocolate factory today that is home of Ora Cacao. With the unwavering support of my daily ritual cup of cacao, I’ve found resiliency and joy in meeting the challenges of nurturing a seed into a tree.
The Inspiration Behind Cacao Discs
Here’s one such story. Back in the early years when I was selling chocolate bars at farmers markets, I of course would give samples to anyone near my booth. To do so, I would break up perfectly molded chocolate bars to share. One day I grew tired of all the extra work this was, and decided to see if I could make little chocolate discs as samples. Sixteen discs at a time, I’d catch them on a piece of parchment paper on a baking tray. I would deftly move and spin that tray around to catch 128 discs on each tray, then put it into the fridge to cool. When I brought these discs to the market and handed out samples, people would say yes I want that! But when I said great, here they are in a chocolate bar, they were disappointed. They wanted the pretty glass jar full of chocolate discs. So for a moment I was very frustrated by my customers, because I had put so much into making chocolate bars, and the discs were very time intensive to make.
After a little while of that happening again and again, I put that experience together with another one. I had visited a friend’s house, and I was looking for something in their pantry when I saw a one quarter eaten chunk of ceremonial cacao sitting there that I had gifted them six months earlier. Incensed, I came out of the pantry and asked why they hadn’t used it yet! They told me it was because they were busy in the mornings and didn’t have time to shave cacao off the chunk and make a drink with it. I brushed the moment off as my friend being lazy. But then one day with a cup of cacao I had an AHA moment - people loved the discs, and ceremonial cacao in chunks was difficult to use. What if ceremonial cacao came in discs?
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How We Made Our First Cacao Discs
There was only one problem. The smallest chocolate disc making machine at the time was very expensive, and required a cooling tunnel that was 100 feet long. My building wasn’t even that big, and the cold room in my factory was only 25 feet long! Undeterred, I set out to build my own machine. I figured that these long cooling tunnels used air cooling, and I could cool the discs from underneath with chilled water, to get them to solidify much faster. My first proof of concept was rerouting the tempered chocolate from my bar molding machine to a pipe that I had drilled a few holes into. A few discs came out, and then the pipe promptly solidified. Soon I wrapped the pipe in heating tape, and drilled different size holes to account for pressure drop. Then I had to hack the cooling belt controller, so that it would pause as I was depositing the discs and we wouldn’t get ovals. Once we got the belt running continuously, we began noticing that when we refilled the tempering machine tank with new chocolate it would sometimes knock the discs out of temper if we refilled it too fast. So I rigged an optical eye (a level sensor) to a chocolate pump that trickles in just the right amount of chocolate to be able to run a continuous process. All said, our first cacao discs machine took a tremendous amount of ingenuity and constant upkeep to produce our early cacao discs. As more and more people loved the cacao discs, I knew that we’d have to get professional equipment and a new building to house it.
It took us over three years to get Ora’s factory built and dialed into where it is today. This year we’re celebrating that we’ve grown from making sixteen cacao discs at a time to competently and reliably producing over sixty million cacao discs annually! It is a huge commitment to build and independently operate our own space, but it is also what enables us to bring you the quality that we do, and the ability to reach an ever growing community with ceremonial cacao of the best quality that does not compromise on our values and keeps a personal touch. It is what allows us to support farming communities around the world that practice regenerative agroforestry, and ensure good livelihoods for a new generation of cacao farmers.
I’m so enormously grateful that over the last few years the Ora Cacao community has grown in a way that can sustain our vision. We have so many more cacaos that we are excited to share with you! Y’all fill me with bunches of gratitude because it really takes all of us to make it happen. Thanks for believing in our vision and connecting with cacao in all of your own ways. It brings a smile to my face.
