You may have heard the term “criollo beans” marketed as a high quality, ancient cacao bean. We’re sharing our learnings from one of the world’s leading cacao geneticists to explain why Criollo cacao isn’t what the marketing makes it out to be. We’re also sharing the factors we consider truly important in high quality ceremonial cacao.
Continue reading to learn more.
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The Truth About “Criollo Beans”
Criollo beans are being marketed as an ancient domestic cacao bean grown by the Mayans and their forebears like the Olmec and Zaptoec. However, the truth is that there are very few farms in the world today that even cultivate genetically pure Criollo. Here’s why:
- Criollo cacao never grew in the wild, but rather was widely cultivated and popularized in pre-Columbian Central America and Mexico from an ancestral wild population believed to have originated near the present-day border of Colombia and Ecuador. This type of cacao was only cultivated in the Northern parts of South America in countries such as Venezuela limited regions in Colombia, and in Trinidad in the Caribbean. Major cacao producing countries deeper in the continent such as Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil with native cacao strains never cultivated these ancient domesticated types.
- There are semantic problems with the word "criollo.". In Latin America, the word “criollo” in practice usually translates to “local.”. Examples of this use can be seen in other food references, for example, to identify local varieties of potatoes or even chickens. As a result, farmers in much of South America will often refer to their local varieties of cacao as Criollo. In this context, use of this term is of course not wrong, however when used in marketing or sales to chocolate makers or consumers, it is misleading and creates even deeper confusion.
- Cacao is very difficult to neatly classify. Currently, well over a dozen discrete populations of cacao are known to exist. Most popular articles about cacao will mention three varieties: Criollo, Forastero, and Trinitario. This originally popularized three-tier classification system is inaccurate and has long since been replaced with a more complex classification system of distinct populations, but most of the public isn’t aware of this. Most importantly, these different populations are very diverse and offer a wide range of agricultural and flavor potential, with no single population being necessarily better than another.
- Cacao trees with different genetic backgrounds cross pollinate all the time. In the present day, with a few exceptions, the vast majority of cultivated cacao is not a “pure” cultivar or heirloom type as landraces and trees are largely planted from seed. After nearly one hundred years of open-pollinated hybridization between primarily Trinitario and Upper Amazon varieties, most cacao trees are a complex mix of at least 3-4 genetic groups, with each tree in a given field being a unique individual. What’s fascinating about this hybridization is that it means most fields have a lot of genetic diversity and as a result, the potential for a complex range of flavors.
For cacao, genetic complexity is actually beneficial because of flavor complexity and in some cases disease resistance. As articulated by physicist and ecologist Fritjof Capra: “A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.”
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Our Approach To Quality Doesn’t Have To Do With Genetics
We believe that cacao is a regionally specific plant enmeshed with the ecosystem and culture of a place. We think it's a mistake to prioritize only one strain of cacao.
As long as it isn’t an industrial strain optimized for output, we view genetics as secondary. Many other steps in cacao growing and processing impact the flavor and potency to an equal or greater degree than genetics. This includes factors like regional soils and weather patterns, the local ecosystem, the fermentation (arguably the most important), the roasting, the conching, and even the well being of the people working with it.
We believe there is far more meaning to derive from highlighting a place of origin’s unique culture and ecosystem than some obscure information about genetics that takes a degree in agronomy to properly understand.
The cacao from each region we source from has a unique and completely different hybrid genetic profile. NONE of those differences in genetics make one cacao region objectively better than another. So let's celebrate this diversity!
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