All food has some level of contamination, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. You can still enjoy your chocolate, spices, coffee, and other agricultural products, but you should know a few things. Click to read about contamination bioavailability.
There’s a word that gets thrown at you the moment you bring a nicer bag of coffee to the office, or explain why you spent $30 on single-origin beans, or turn down the gas station chocolate bar. That word is “snob.”
Elevation is a key component to coffee quality, yet you won’t find any information about it on a bag of coffee on a retail shelf. Learn more about how elevation affects coffee flavor, and how by not adding this crucial number to the bag or website that you know the coffee you’re drinking may not be all that great.
Embue Cacao offers great cacao that was once sourced from Guatemala, however, now it seems only Dominican Republic and Ugandan cacao are available. They updated the heavy metal testing to disclose the numbers and they talk about their sourcing methods. Checkout the update on Embue Cacao for more information.
Maya Moon Cacao is a true, indigenous-owned cacao company based out of La Laguna, Guatemala. Run by sisters Maura and Elizabet, Maya Moon puts mission and community above all else. If you want authentic drinking cacao, give Maya Moon a read.
Dave’s Sweet Tooth Toffee didn’t launch with a PR firm, a seed round, or a Shopify influencer deal. It started with a retired Detroit firefighter making almond toffee in his kitchen, packing it into mason jars, and handing it out to guys at the engine house. That’s it. That’s the whole origin story.
The ceremonial cacao market is full of brands that use the right language without doing the right work. “Direct trade,” “heirloom,” “ceremonial-grade”: these are labels that cost nothing to print on a bag. Backing them up is another matter entirely, and that’s where Cacao Laboratory steps up.
PERC coffee aims to lightheartedly bring you popular specialty coffee estates. The branding is colorful and welcoming and the coffee is sourced directly from the estates with traceability. Located around Atlanta, Georgia, you can drop by one of their many cafes and enjoy a fresh brew of PERC.
As a coffee enthusiast, I have avoided the mushroom coffee trend for a plethora of reasons. Questionable sourcing, fad companies cropping up, and misleading advertising were all reasons I did not partake in beverage. After a deep dive, I’ve changed my mind.
Health Benefits of Drinking Brewed Cacao Brewing cacao is blowing up in popularity and for good reason. It’s exceptionally healthy,
Read about companies I’ve spent countless hours researching so you don’t have to. Many of them will be family owned or small businesses that lack the resources to rapidly grow. If you want good quality, ethical chocolate, start here.
Trust Issues with Top Google Results One of the driving motivators for creating this blog was this very example I’m
Hydrangea Coffee Roasters Hydrangea Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roaster out of Berkeley, California. Their artwork is unique and
Looking at the top listings for “organic cacao powder” in Amazon, do you have any idea which are good? There’s lots of buzzwords and lots of healthy looking packaging. The results are going to surprise you. Click to find out which I have vetted to be a good purchase.
A highly curated and consistently updated list of recommended cocoa powders that I have personally researched and meet my rigorous standards.
Every cocoa powder company is going to tell you how organic they are and what sets them apart from the other hundreds of cocoa powders. Let’s see what DOES make them different.
Yup, I said it. Everyone gets this wrong ranging from dietitians, culinary experts, industry insiders, and consumers. I have seen a couple instances of articles getting it correctly, but it’s quite rare. There is no uniformity on what consists of cocoa and cacao, and you’ll hear so many different answers that you’ll walk away worse off than when you started.
Captain’s Chocolate is a micro-business that ethically sources their chocolate from Costa Rica, which is quite rare from my research, as oppose to Peru, Ecuador, and African countries. They test their product and post the results, which can be seen here. They are probably the smallest business I’ll be reviewing. This is the first chocolate company I’ve seen that contains no lead.
Embue Cacao checks a lot of boxes that matter. Direct-trade sourcing from Guatemalan Q’eqchi’ farming communities, 1% For the Planet membership, a partnership with a legitimate reforestation nonprofit, and bean-to-bar processing done in-house in Vermont. On paper, this is exactly the kind of small-batch company that Consumer Deep Dive exists to highlight.
Hu Chocolate is one of the best examples of a terrible company that hits all the trending buzzwords in organic chocolate and renders their meanings useless (just look at that packaging). They test high in heavy metals and will not publicly post their results, they greenwash their customers about it, and there’s no mention of how and where they source their chocolate from. Hu Chocolate was started by wealthy owners that wanted to own a business and they landed on chocolate. That’s about as deep as it goes.
