Jonas crafts unsweetened ceremonial grade cacao that is used in cacao ceremonies around the world. He hosts cacao ceremony monthly with his men’s circle, during which they drink cacao and then practice embodied wrestling. He also regularly teaches how to stone grind fresh cacao paste from the bean using a traditional metate. After first encountering sipping chocolate in Oaxaca Mexico in 2012, Jonas founded the bean to bar dark chocolate company, Firefly Chocolate, in 2014, with the mission of inspiring awe and wonder through cacao. Always with a focus on health, he initially launched 85% dark chocolate in a variety of flavors, sweetened with low glycemic coconut sugar. He also pioneered a bio-regional wild harvested chocolate bar, celebrating bay nuts, a food used by the native peoples of the SF Bay Area.

Jonas’s engineering know how keeps all the tools running at Ora Cacao. He actually built or hacked most of them with his combined mechanical, electrical, and software background. Previously, in his roles as Imagineer at Greenlight Planet and engineering lead at Fenix International, he worked on providing affordable solar energy to disadvantaged rural communities, mostly in India and East Africa. He is a Mechanical Engineering graduate from Stanford University, where his favorite classes were in the machine shop, and where he studied energy efficient buildings with professor Gil Masters. As a first generation American originally from Germany he received the prestigious Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for his graduate studies.

Jonas studied permaculture and nature awareness at the Regenerative Design Institute, and has lived in eco-villages and cooperative houses for the majority of the last ten years. He loves cycling and backpacking, and has cycled the Alps and across the San Juan Islands, thru hiked the John Muir Trail, and summited Mt. Shasta and Mt. Ritter. He spends many months each year sleeping outside directly on the earth and he loves harvesting his own spring water and traveling to soak in hot springs.

He hopes to meet you one day and share in the awe and wonder of being alive while sharing gratitude and intention over a frothy morning cacao drink!