Our Origin Story

CORA comes from the Spanish word "Corazón", meaning heart. Further, it comes from the Latin, "Cor", meaning "heart or innermost".

Once while having ceremonial cacao daily, I began to experience what I discovered to be a "purging" effect. For basically an entire week, I was stuck crying and seething with anger as old emotions came to the surface. That's when I understood that at the root of our love for chocolate was something real yet forgotten, and knew I had to get involved.

I thought, "What if we could get people out of their heads (coffee) and into their heart (cacao)?" Well that would be worthwhile. So I decided to throw my hat in the ring, try to make the world 1% better, all that idealistic stuff.

I scoured the internet to find a door in to the world of cacao and after some searching, vetting, phone calls, and samples, I found the right fit.

The group we work with in Lake Atitlan is a hybrid social impact organization. They are like a project manager connecting the farming co-operatives to the women's co-operative which handles processing, and finally connecting the finished cacao to international markets. Cora's role is to spread this finished product in the US. 

As a distributor of cacao, we serve some of the highest quality ceremonial grade cacao available.

We are able to do that through a model of "direct trade". Let me explain:

Direct Trade & Right Livelihood

(Thanks Siddartha)

We emphasize sourcing a finished product, not a raw ingredient. Normally, cacao companies buy beans for cheap and turn the beans into a final product in a factory somewhere in the country of sale. We view this model to be fundamentally exploitative, extractive, and non-reciprocal. This is a mindset of only looking out for our own interests, which seems to be plaguing our world.

High demand for chocolate in the West has created a highly exploitative system (favoring the West). In order to produce more cacao in a profit-driven market, small cacao farmers have been forced to adapt with monoculture farms, utilizing child labor and chemicals. These practices produce higher volumes of lower quality cacao (think Hershey's bar). The effect on the ecosystem is deforestation, soil degradation, loss of wildlife, water pollution, human rights abuses, and health problems.

As a consequence, farmers are left with less fertile lands, become disconnected from their roots, and are paid very low prices for their product because it is a raw ingredient. The rest of the bar creation process occurs in the US. Many chocolate products use beans from all over a given country, are heated using high heat to create uniform flavor, and are processed using machinery. For every $20 generated in the chocolate industry, only around $1 remains with the farmers. The "Fair Trade" and "Rainforest Alliance" movements were started to help people and the planet in a system that had never looked out for either.

We allow the communities we source from to own the process of production, meaning Cora does not buy cacao beans for cheap and finish the product ourselves. Our goal is to help small farmers keep their way of life, and in selling single origin cacao in it's original form, we can create prosperity in the regions where cacao is produced. It's a win for farmers, for consumers, and for the planet. We create a value exchange where everybody is well taken care of.

The ceremonial grade movement seeks to shift the current paradigm of cacao trade to a more equitable one. In order for a product to be ceremonial grade, it, among many other important factors, must be grown and finished (plant to paste) in the country of origin. Very few of the big brands do this - not Ora Cacao, not Cacao Lab, not Koracao. Why not? Because in a capitalist system which optimizes for efficiency, not quality, this approach is less scalable and less profitable. They are certainly stepping in the right direction, and through their work we are getting closer to an equitable cacao system, but there is more work to be done.

Equity looks like the historical stewards of the cacao plant owning more of the cacao production process, which translates to more value being created for their community in the process. How much more value? On average, around 2000% more value.

This is only the beginning.

Finally, our cacao comes from Guatemala - the Mayan motherland for cacao. From the perspective that plants are an intelligent spirit, this plant has had thousands of years of life in this land - used as medicine, as currency, and as a drink shared by loved ones.