Today we’d like to introduce you to Jose Visconti.
Hi Jose, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started working with Cacao in Northern Peru about 10 years ago after concluding my Agricultural Business degree from Cal Poly SLO, where I set an overall goal to work with small family farmers and help preserve biodiversity. I wasn’t 100% sure how, where, or who I wanted to work with until I watched an Anthony Bourdain special where he visited Peru and found farmers who were growing a rare cultivar of cacao that had white beans (most cacao beans are purple).
Shortly after, I visited family in Peru, made some connections in the industry, moved down there and found a job working with a small high quality bean-to-bar company in Peru who needed help organizing farmers and standardizing processes throughout the Peruvian countryside. During this time, I learned technical skills from a world class Agricultural Engineer that had been working with Cacao in Venezuela for 30 years, and eventually found a job working as a contractor for the UN providing technical consulting to farmer co-ops around the country. With this job I was able to go to unimaginable remote places, meeting amazing farmers, see virgin land, and felt pretty confident that I was one of the few people from the “outside world” that have visited these areas after the initial surge of explorers from the 1500’s and 1600’s.
During this time, a lot of scientific literature was being written about the geographical origins of the original wild strains of Cacao. One key study by Dr. Juan Carlos Motomayor which was later confirmed by Evert Thomas, concluded that the Upper Amazon Basin, an area that encompasses Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia was the most likely birthplace of the wild strains, so I decided to focus my efforts here. I was particularly interested in working with specific native Awajún communities that were far enough from most major cities and were excited to work in a program I was proposing that paid higher prices for their Cacao that I had determined had unique genetics. The plan was to increase their incomes significantly since most of the merchants in their areas were known price gougers, but sadly were the only connection they had to world markets.
Fast forward to two years later, and the program had found moderate success, but not to the degree I had desired. After analyzing what my original goal had been and where I was then, I decided to sell my portion of small chocolate company, Elemento, and move back to the US so I could take a step back, regroup, and and focus on starting a master’s degree in food science at Chapman University. After a few months I decided to start making some chocolate at home to satisfy my soul, but when I looked for good source of cacao, I couldn’t find the quality that I was used to. That’s when I decided to bring a personal stash of mine from Peru after going back to visit family.
Some friend tried what I was making and started asking to purchase my personal stash. Little by little the word started spreading and family and friends were fascinated by the chocolate I was making, some even wanted 100% unsweetened Cacao! I looked more into why, and it turns out that there is an emerging market for “Ceremonial Cacao,” which is not an easy concept to explain, but basically means that people are willing to pay extra for well processed, well made cacao that has been respected throughout its supply chain, and most importantly, comes from small family farmers that value their land and communities.
And that’s how destiny decided to give me and my wife Samoa, a sign that we could share this cacao with the world and keep supporting the farmers that were so important to me. I asked Samoa, my genius digital marketing wife, if she would be willing to resign from the startup that she had been working with on the side, and she said Yes! I called one of my most trusted allies during my time down there, who had a similar journey to mine, and it turned out he had invested in his own chocolate factory and was willing to use the same communities I had worked with, and that’s when the Cacao Adventures journey started.
The company was founded in 2023 but we didn’t start selling Ceremonial Cacao to the public until February 2024. We started selling on our own website and an Etsy shop, mores as a hobby to satisfy my passion. It wasn’t until June 2024 that Samoa was laid off her corporate job in the tech industry that she decided to really focus on Cacao Adventures and apply her expertise to try to build the brand from scratch, which se did until she found another job by the end of summer.
Since we’ve started its been really encouraging to see how happy people when they try our cacao, seeing all the 5 stars reviews, and the community that really appreciates cacao has brought us so much joy and reassurance that we are in the correct path and building a great future with an amazing community.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Cacao adventures is focused on sharing the original wild strains of cacao with the world and also working closely with the farmers that grow this amazing fruit. We consider ourselves a bridge for people that appreciate and understand cacao to the farmers that grown and maintain these strains on their land. I initially started in commerce as a bean-to-bar chocolate company but soon realized this market is over saturated and most people that consume sweetened chocolate don’t understand the importance of sourcing from the right farmers, genetics, and origins.
Working with small family farmers as a collective has also taught us a lot of lessons. Most of our farmers are small land holders and we need a large enough harvest to ensure quality, and harvesting needs to happen on the same day. Convincing and organizing a community of about 100 people to harvest their small farms at the same time was not easy. We tend to romanticize how easy and fun it might be to live in a community in the middle of the Amazon, but in reality, the farmers in these communities all have their own goals, personal ambitions, and tensions with each other, which proved difficult to manage at times.
Working in Peru, alongside a number of NGO’s who have different missions has also raised some unique challenges. For example, many organizations in Peru started work in the early 90’s to provide alternative crops for farmers who were growing coca leaves, the precursors of cocaine, in an effort to eradicate the plant. To do this, they provided coca farmers with high productivity strains of cacao. If you fast forward to the present day, these projects are all over Peru now, even in areas that have never grown and are not apt for growing coca leaves. This ends up affecting farmers who were originally cultivating the original wild strains of cacao and have been for thousands of years. The NGO’s convinced them to switch to these new cultivars that promise high yields, but low quality. Our mission then becomes more difficult because we have to exclude communities that grow these strains, even if its only in 10% of the farms, and the concern is due to cross-pollination of the highly productive strains with the original wild ones. This requires us to increase our education and communication efforts so that farmers understand that they can make more money by keeping their original lower productivity strains that command much higher farm gate prices from our organization. The alternative is that they grow the higher productivity strains, but end up receiving much lower prices since the merchants in these areas take advantage of how far away these farmers are from major centers of commerce, and pay them a fraction of the world price of cocoa.
CBP holds when importing to the US have also become an issue for us. Since were a relatively new company and we’re importing products from an area that is known for drug trafficking, CBP has been placing holds on our shipments when they arrive on American Soil. We have no control during this process, which is extremely frustrating, we have to pay very high daily storage fees, along with the fees for the CBP examinations as well. CBP doesn’t take into account that we’re a small family owned philanthropically focused company.
We both have full time jobs, a 1 year old baby, and I’m working on pursuing a Master’s degree in food science, so time is definitely a limiting factor for us, but we really want to keep working with these communities and sharing this cacao with the world, especially our community, and aim to live off this business so we can continue doing good work and do even more of it.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Cacao Adventures?
We are a company that focuses on harvesting and protecting the original wild strains of cacao. We have explored the Upper Amazon Basin and developed relationships with native communities in these areas who have guarded these wild strains without necessarily knowing that they were doing so. We have developed technical protocols throughout the supply chain, which involves selecting farms and educating them on specific harvesting techniques so that we can ferment and dry the beans to their optimal point and then process into 100% ceremonial cacao paste that lacks (or at the very least is highly reduced) bitterness.
Our unique perspective of being involved throughout the supply chain sets us apart. Most ceremonial cacao companies in the US don’t get as involved in their supply chain as we do and most brands tend to have the same general origins stated by country. Instead, we focus on specific geographical areas in Peru. This can be compared to the wine industry; think of wines that just state “California” versus wines that are “Estate Grown” in Napa Valley. We are the latter. Our micro-climate and micro-origin focus allow us to bring the best of the Peruvian Amazon right to our customer’s pantries.
Any big plans?
We are already building an online presence but we are trying to share it more within our community, starting with Cardiff and San Diego.
We plan on bringing more unique Micro-Origins to our line of Ceremonial Cacao products to increase the amount of farmers in our network. We are also leveraging our food science expertise by developing new products, the first being our Unmilk’d™️ chocolate, which we’re offering at the moment and currently have 3 types of 1.8 oz (50 gr) bars to offer:
1) 100% Ceremonial Cacao
2) 70% Chocolate Bar sweetened with Coconut Sugar
3) UnMilk’d™️ Chocolate Bar – This is a unique recipe that mimics milk chocolate but is actually dairy-free. The bar retains the same mouthfeel and satisfaction of a milk chocolate bar, but it’s actually very high in fiber and antioxidants thanks to Lúcuma, a little known, yet powerful Peruvian superfood.
We are also starting to grow our portfolio of bulk clients, where we supply the same 100% cacao we use in bulk at industry-friendly prices. Our philosophy is not to make the most money, but rather to do the most amount of good for our farmers. If we can find steady wholesale accounts that value our unique quality, we can grow our network of farmers and help maintain these original wild strains for future generations, and hopefully encourage their children to continue the family farms.
Pricing:
- Ceremonial Grade Cacao bags from $23.99
- Chocolate Gift Set = $18.00
Contact Info:
- Website: www.cacaoadventures.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cacaoadventures/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@cacao.adventures
