Original Beans Collection

Our Craft Cacaos

Every Journey Starts with a Single Bean

We go to the farthest corners of the globe to bring you the rare. Since 2008, our intrepid Bean Team ventures into the most remote, most biologically diverse and most threatened ecoregions - or simply: the biodiversity hotspots - to bring original beans to you.

Know Your Beans

Knowing where your cacao is from goes beyond pointing to a place on a map. It’s knowing that the environment around it is protected, the people who cultivate it empowered and the plants from which it grows regenerated. In addition to pure, delicious taste, that’s the promise every bar of Original Beans keeps. Share the rare. And spare it.

PURELY DELICIOUS

Cacao Is Craft

Good fermentation makes good food - from grapes, milk, sourdough, and … Original Beans cacaos.

Our craft of cacao starts with regenerative farming. It moves through fermentation (spontaneous), drying (sun only), storing (zero fumigation), roasting (slow and low), grinding (16 micron), conching (medium) and tempering (gentle, gentle). Where cacao ends and chocolate starts is anyone’s crafty guess.   

Know your beans

Rare Cacaos

Beans of wisdom, our select tribal cacaos represent the deep history and commitment of the indigenous tribes who know—and grow—them best. Their singular tastes revive long-forgotten human experiences of living in harmony with nature. Truly exclusive, they have no peer in making a higher social or environmental impact.

Arhuaco Lands, Colombia
Preserve the harmonious ways
of the Arhuaco tribe
Selva Zoque, Mexico
Revive the spirited traditions
of the Zoque tribe

No place is too high (the 1200m at which our Cusco Chuncho grows) nor too hidden (the wild Beniano that can only be reached by boat) to collect the rarest of beans. These chocolates’ flavours travel to the far reaches of the imagination
SACRED CUSCO VALLEY, PERU
Keep the
mighty
condor
in flight
BENI AMAZON, BOLIVIA
Safeguard wild cacao lands, home to
the vivid blue-throated macaws

These ultra rare beans (nearly extinct in the case of Piura Porcelana and Papua Kerafat upon their rediscovery) are aromatic time capsules from the earth’s remotest regions like the amazingly biodiverse Udzungwa Mountain National Park.

Piura Valley, Peru
Help Peru's bright butterfly
collection stay aloft
Udzungwa Park, Tanzania
Give Udzungwa's playful
elephants safe passage

Filled with nature’s abundance and diversity (from the rich landscapes of Virunga National Park to the mists of Esmeraldas’ last cloudforests) these rare beans put pure deliciousness and purposeful consumption within reach.

Virunga Park, Congo DR
Protect the last 800 mountain gorillas
deep in Congo
Virunga Park, Congo Dr
Empower strong women
with strong cacao
ESMERALDAS COAST, ECUADOR
Protect the last cloud 
forest in Ecuador

Open sourcing

The Craft Cacao Standard

We joke that you can always make bad chocolate from good beans, but not the other way around. Bad cacao always reveals itself as unpalatable in too many ways: from flavour defects, to social injustice to environmental degradation.

To assure tasty beans that go down well in every respect, we offer here for open sourcing, the world's only Craft Cacao Standard.  Here it is for your review and use.

EARTH’S RAREST PLACES

The Original Beans
Collection