REVIVE THE SPIRITED TRADITIONS OF THE ZOQUE TRIBE

Selva Zoque, Mexico

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"Kakaw" from the inventors of chocolate

The deep green ranges of Selva Zoque in Southern Mexico can be considered the birthplace of chocolate. For over 4000 years people here have cultivated cacao. In fact, the ancient Zoque and their forefathers – the Olmecs – were minds as brilliant as the Greeks of Europe. They were stargazers and kept an advanced calendar, they invented the sauna and a ball game – and then they invented a powerful sacred drink from a forest fruit they called “kakaw”. That was the birth of chocolate.

Much as today’s spirited Zoque and Tzotzil farmers feel supported by Original Beans, we feel honoured to help them revive the world’s original cacao tradition and the sustainable guardianship of the Selva Zoque rainforests.

Know your bean

What we call Tabasqueño is the wild hybrid of an ancient criollo cacao from the time of the ancient Olmecs and Mayas and an amelonado cacao brought to the coast of Tabasco by a French family in the early 1900’s.

One bar : One tree @Zoque

The ancestrals forests of the Zoque and Tzotzil tribes in the Selva Zoque are disappearing. Our project raises the local cacao price and actively converts cattle land back into traditional home gardens, where Tabasqueño cacao is planted among fourty other crops and tree species. As our Zoque and Tzotzil farmers make a better living, they support the protection of endangered animals like the spider monkey and jaguar.

So here is what we have been working on since 2014:

Establish a direct-trade supply chain and support organic certification for 3 indigenous villages
Educate farmers in forest-friendly and organic cacao farming
Raise selected Tabasqueño cacao and forest trees in 7 village-based nurseries
Convert pasture land to diverse cacao-forests that function as buffer zones and wildlife corridors on the border of the rainforest
Preserve 1.200 hectares of rainforest and native landscape through conservation agreements

Want to follow the impact of this project? One Bar : One Tree : Go see

“It’s important to teach our children how to be patient and to protect our land, so every generation can prosper.”

Don Jose, cacao farmer in Cerro Blanco

Zoque

Spirited Dark

Tropical aromas of lychee and coconut in this Select Tribal Tabasqueño cacao have lifted the spirits of local Zoque and Tzotzil tribes for millennia. One Bar : One Tree Each sale of Zoque 88% helps revive their 4000 year-old traditions and the animals they celebrate.