This is Jonas, founder of Firefly.
Today is World Chocolate Day, so I'd like to take this opportunity to share our perspectives and help you celebrate with awareness.
Modern chocolate is a highly monopolized and archaic business, with most of the chocolate consumed globally produced by just a handful of corporations.
There’s very little accountability for positive labor and environmental practices, and even efforts such as fair trade chocolate have fallen severely short.
One recent reminder of this is that just a couple of weeks ago. Nestle prevailed in a US Supreme court hearing attempting to hold them liable for not being able to prove that they have eliminated slave labor in their supply chains. This was something the US Congress mandated two decades ago.
Firefly was a signatory on this suit against them, as our business is living proof against their argument that they “couldn’t do it”. Nestle claimed that, as a chocolate company, it wasn't possible to prove that they didn't use slave labor, which is clearly not the truth.
But big money and lawyers prevailed again, and big chocolate got off without any accountability.
We are living in a time of great unveiling, as the cracks in our mainstream culture and systems are revealed.
We are seeing the limitations of individualistic, isolating behavior, of ‘having more’, and of mass consumerism.
We are seeing that “modernity” is built on a foundation of greed, insatiable and unsustainable resource extraction, distorted power and scarcity consciousness.
These systems are devoid of a true respect and reverence for the spirit and web of life on which we depend on, which is not separate from humanity.
In a culture without rituals that tend to our emotional well-being, we have a lot of grieving and forgiveness to do as we work with plant medicines to reclaim our sacred relationship with our earth, our bodies, and our spiritual guidance.
As we do so we are returning to our most generous potential and capacities: including relationship, true healing and resolution, love, stewardship of this beautiful earth home, and gratitude as the foundational way of being and living.
We are shedding culturally imprinted values in favor of values that resonate from the core of our beings and that are in service to all of life.
We have a long way to go to make this shift and yet we must.
Several ancient myths say that cacao emerges from the rainforest during times of great ecological imbalance, to remind and teach people how to live in a harmonious and sustainable way.
The time is ripe: all around the earth people are awakening from a cultural amnesia, and people are gravitating en masses toward plant medicines.
People are hungry for tools to help them reconnect with their hearts, because this shift from head to heart is a journey that many beings are now ready to allow, and cacao, in particular, connects us to our heart energy.
More and more people are ready to learn from cacao, rediscovering ceremony, ritual, gratitude, prayer, and stewardship of all of life.
To receive these gifts we must choose a deeper relationship with cacao than the one we’ve been offered through chocolate candy.
So we must do our part to understand and value the teachings, stories, and history that come with cacao.
Thank you for choosing ceremonial cacao, and being a part of our family as we all work together to shift global consciousness! We couldn’t do it without you.
With Love, Gratitude, & Cacao,
Jonas & The Firefly Family
