2025 is turning out to be another eventful year behind the scenes at Ora Cacao! Purchasing the highest quality cacao on the planet is anything but straightforward these days, so our team has been hard at work.
Here are updates from each of the communities we work with, as we’re finally receiving new shipments of cacao beans and bringing Boundless Belize and soon Glowing Guatemala back in stock! We’ll also share an overview of the global market and how we’re updating our pricing on August 22nd.
As we shared with you in 2024, the manifold increase in global cacao prices is a much needed, generational interruption to a status quo that for decades undervalued cacao, resulting in a lack of right livelihood for farmers and lack of reciprocity to the ecosystems it comes from. We still have a long way to go globally towards meeting those goals. That’s why we are thrilled that with your support we’ve been setting a benchmark and scaling practices for sourcing cacao regeneratively and ethically that many others are looking towards.
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Belize
You may remember that last year Belize experienced devastating wildfires, impacting about 10% of our farmers there. We sent those farmers cash from our Farmer Climate Resiliency Fund to help them meet a year’s worth of daily expenses while they began cleanup and replanting (huge gratitude to all who donated!). With this in mind, it’s extra great news that Belize had a much longer than usual rainy season.
That extra rain though is why we’ve been out of Boundless Belize for a few months now. Now the wait is almost over and it will be back in stock on August 22nd!
Colombia
We’ve been out of Colombian cacao for some time now, and it may still be some time, we have no ETA for it. Last November, Shaina and Jonas met with a new partner organization in the Sierra Nevada mountains that showed promise and scalability, but initial post harvest evaluations were not up to our standards. We’re still working with these partners to make improvements and also evaluating cacao sourcing in the region more broadly so that we can continue supporting the regenerative forestry work of the indigenous Arhuaco people.
Guatemala
Good news from Guatemala is after several years of a poor harvest, we finally have cacao beans landed from the community of Chivite that we’ve worked with for a long time. To make sure we don’t run out again as quickly, we’ll be blending that cacao with the cacao of another community in the region that Jonas visited in January that also produces an excellent cacao.
Jonas spent the winter holiday and New Year in Guatemala, falling more in love with the beautiful land and people. It was heartbreaking to see how many farmers had lost up to ⅓ of their trees due to climate change and drought. It was also hopeful to see a good rainy season nourishing the land at last and giving the farmers a bigger harvest than anticipated. The farmers are understandably concerned that a repeat of the completely dry “rainy” seasons will harm more of their trees, and there is very little we can do to alleviate that fear as climate change brings unprecedented changes to tropical regions.
Tanzania
The farmers in Tanzania are doing amazing. They’ve had a regular harvest and unlike most places where the middlemen absorb the profit, our stellar partners are passing it through and the farmers are receiving 3x over what they used to receive for cacao. With such a big price increase of course there’s challenges on the ground to manage that in a well organized way, but it’s helping the entire organization grow and improve. Our new batch of cacao from Tanzania is exceptional and we’re excited to send it your way!
Uganda
Uplifting Uganda has been enormously popular, and we narrowly averted running out of it! The near out of stock had nothing to do with the farms. Rather a container shortage in East Africa kept our shipment stuck at port for over a month before we could get the cacao loaded on a ship, and then the shipping time became inexplicably extended by an extra month as well. Fortunately we have a good supply now and similarly to Tanzania the farmers are doing well!
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Cacao Price
If you remember our email from last spring, commodity cacao bean prices last year saw a significant increase of fourfold, which has impacted everybody working in cacao. On the global market, drought and torrential rain, cacao diseases due to monoculture planting and aging trees, and declining yields due to low soil fertility and underinvestment in farms, led to multiple years of cacao shortages.
We sent a small price bump your way last year but it wasn’t enough to help us keep up with how much we are paying to purchase the cacao that we all love, especially as we offered new discounts with our subscription program that many of you are enjoying.
We were very creative last year to meet the enormous cash outlays needed for purchasing cacao beans and supporting our organic certified small family cacao farmers with some of the best prices on the planet. However that was only a temporary fix and as it has become evident that tariffs and higher cacao prices are here to stay, to continue to share the highest quality ceremonial cacao, on August 22nd we’ll be increasing our base pricing roughly 10% across the store.
We will also introduce additional price increases on Boundless Belize and Glowing Guatemala as Central American cacao prices are at an all time high and Guatemalan cacao in particular is some of the most expensive in the world at the moment due to loss of cacao trees. Tantric Rose Blossom will also see a premium due to persistently high cost of organic rose petals which we use a lot of!
If you want to stock up on cacao at our current pricing, now’s a great time to order! What we're doing here is beyond just sharing the best cacao we can find with you, it's about regeneration and stewardship of vibrant and diverse rainforest ecosystems, supporting sustainable livelihoods for distributed networks of small family farms, and providing transformational mental health and physical wellness outcomes for folks like you drinking our cacao. So thank you for continuing to be a customer and for being part of this bigger mission with us.
