Embue Cacao has expanded to offering Dominican Republic and Ugandan cacao while quietly no longer offering Guatemalan cacao. Allulose is no longer an ingredient in their chocolate.
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.
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.
Chocolate has gotten a bad reputation over the past couple of years, and deservedly so, about the concern of heavy metals. And this is a very valid concern. Many chocolate companies had significantly higher than safely consumable levels of lead and cadmium in them that you have been unknowingly consuming for most of your life. … Read more