All About Single-Variety Cacao

Have you ever heard of single-variety cacao?

If you are a fan of craft chocolate, you’re probably familiar with words like single-origin, single-estate and single-farm. These refer to the wide or narrow indication of where the cacao for a specific chocolate was grown. Differently, single-variety cacao is not a geographical reference, but it’s all about genetics.

Growers of single-variety cacao choose a scientific approach to this raw material: after finding their desired cacao variety by testing fruits from selected trees, they duplicate the mother trees through grafting and develop strict fermentation protocols to bring out the best flavors in every batch. Processing the same variety of cacao allows for an extraordinary consistency in both flavors and processes, together with a detailed optimization of fermentation and roasting.

But what advantages and downsides does this approach bring? Does single-variety cacao maintain its flavor profile regardless of where it’s planted? Then what about terroir? Is it a good practice for the environment and the cacao farmers that grow it? And is it a niche or a growing trend?

Frank Homann, founder of Xoco Gourmet, has been a pioneer and passionate promoter of single-variety cacao since 2007. His main goal has been to bring out the purest flavors from specific cacao varieties using an objective and scientific approach taken from other fruit categories. Xoco was founded with the vision to significantly increase flavor in chocolate. As he says:

“Chocolate is a hedonistic food that people eat just for the pleasure of it. You don’t use it to wake you up in the morning like coffee, or to get tipsy like wine. Even the health benefits of chocolate are debatable. We consume chocolate for the pure pleasure of it. And flavor is its most important component.”

Here is my interview with Frank all about single-variety cacao.

Frank Homann, founder of Xoco Gourmet.

What exactly is single-variety cacao?

Variety is a genetic grouping based on flavor. The genes that are responsible for flavor are different in each variety. This is something that happens in all fruit categories, for example apples. There are around 7,500 different apple varieties, like the Granny Smith and the Golden Delicious. And here is the deal: no matter where you grow them, they will always have the same fundamental flavor characteristics. They can grow in different places around the world with different soil compositions, rainfall or sunlight, but a Granny Smith will always taste pretty tangy and sour, while a Golden Delicious will always retain its sweetness and be pretty easy to eat. This is all because of their genes that determine their flavor. Being a fruit tree, cacao behaves exactly the same.

Single-variety cacao is achieved thanks to grafting, where you join your desired variety (scion) to an existing tree (rootstock). This way, you have full control of the variety you are growing, which is extremely important to then conduct the most appropriate post-harvesting processes, as well as roasting and conching, and bring out the best possible flavors. For wine growers (and also other fruit growers), it is unthinkable to not know what grape variety they are growing, because they wouldn’t be able to optimize the wine-making process. So why has this never been done in cacao?

Cacao nursery at the Xoco Gourmet headquarter in Honduras.

Almost all cacao farmers plant cacao with seeds put in the ground. This is a lot like a roulette in terms of genetics, and the trees will be of an unknown and cross-bred variety. This way, the farmers end up with mixed cacao from different varieties and with different flavors, and they can never optimize their post-harvesting processes because they can never be sure of what they are dealing with.

At Xoco Gourmet, we decided to grow single-variety cacao so that we could be in full control of what kind of fundamental flavor of beans we were growing, to improve fermentation, roasting and conching for that particular variety.

What are the advantages and disadvantages in growing and conducting post-harvesting processes on single-variety cacao?

The first advantage is better flavor. Here is why: when all your cacao beans are of the same variety, you conduct fermentation on a homogeneous batch.

The cacao beans all have the same genes, so we can apply the same post-harvesting protocols for a uniform and consistent result every time. Choosing single-variety cacao also leaves more room for improvement and innovation since we always start with the same kind of cacao, knowing exactly how it should behave and taste. Unfortunately, this can’t happen when you collect cacao that has been planted. With a mixed batch of different cacao varieties with different genetics, how can you optimize fermentation?

In the same fermentation box you end up having different varieties, with different genes and different tasting profiles, that would require different protocols to achieve their best flavors. How can the result be optimized? This is why we find that single-variety cacao gives a more reliable, consistent, and overall better flavor compared to seed-planted cacao.

The second advantage is a no-brainer: the standardization of the post-harvesting processes. We are able to follow the same protocols of fermentation and drying because every batch is made of the same variety.

However, growing single-variety cacao also had its challenges.

Single-variety Mayan Red cacao tree.

Above all, it is definitely more expensive than growing non-single-variety cacao. When we began our cacao journey in 2007, we had to invest a lot of time, money and efforts upfront. First, we had to find the first cacao varieties we wanted to grow. It took almost a year to comb through the jungles of Central America to find a homogenous group of trees with superior flavor potential. There were about 200 old trees in an isolated grove in Northern Honduras. We called this variety Mayan Red.

In Nicaragua, we found five different varieties on or near a farm we later bought in Northern Nicaragua. Flavor varieties do not exist in clonal gardens today. All cacao varieties have been selected for productivity up to now, because the industry has seen cacao as a uniformly tasting commodity product.

After finding the varieties, we had to set up nurseries for the grafted trees. 40 to 50 local people had to be hired and trained to learn how to graft expertly and successfully. This was a lot harder than we anticipated, and it took a year or two before we could produce volumes and plant them. Then we had to work with the trees and wait for them to grow before they started to bear fruits.

We set up the fermentation and drying facilities and started to experiment with the fermentation protocols for about a year before we had the first batch ready. This meant a lot of time, money and effort upfront.

When the first cacao beans were ready to sell, a second challenge presented itself: the market. When we started selling our beans, almost all of our potential customers over-roasted the beans. Our single varieties roast at 115-120 C°, where the industry typically roasts at 130-140 C° or even higher. This overroasting leads to dull and uniform chocolate with little natural and pure taste of the cacao beans.

Eventually, we decided to sell beans only to a select handful of chocolate makers and to make our own chocolate so we would be in full control of the entire process.

You plant your Mayan Red cacao in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Does it taste the same no matter where you plant it? If yes, then is terroir just romanticism?

At Xoco Gourmet, we believe that genes are the primary responsible for the flavor of cocoa, and we are rather skeptical of the powerful influence often attributed to terroir in the narrow sense of the term (soil and weather). When wine makers refer to terroir, they often also refer to the particular graft of grape that they use in a region, for example the tempranillo grape from the Ribera del Duero region of Spain, as well as soil and weather, and the particular processing methods of that region.

Dried Mayan Red cocoa beans bagged in Honduras.

We plant our single-variety Mayan Red cacao not only in different countries, but also in different zones of the same country. In Honduras, we plant Mayan Red cacao in different areas, each one with its own micro-climate: high and low altitudes, lots of sunshine and lots of rain, cool and hot tropical climates. Even on the same farm, the soil composition, the nutrients and the minerals can change from meter to meter. But despite all these different environments, we can only detect slight changes in the flavor of our Mayan Red cacao, which stays incredibly consistent.

It can be next to impossible to trace small variations of flavor because so many factors play into it. But the biggest factors are genetics, fermentation and roasting-conching. We believe that soil and weather terroir have a relatively small influence on the final flavor of cacao.

Based on our 14 years of experience growing cocoa, we found that genetics is the biggest and most controllable factor of all.

Is single-variety cacao more productive than regular fine cacao?

In the chocolate industry there has always been a big dichotomy: fine cacao equals low productivity, while bulk cacao equals high productivity. But has anybody ever tried to apply the high-productivity techniques used in bulk cacao to the production of fine cacao?

This is what we are now starting to do. We have a test farm in Nicaragua, which is relatively small with 100 hectares, where we planted single-variety cacao trees following protocols similar to an apple orchard: you can get a tractor between the rows; there is a high density of 1,800 trees per hectare; irrigation systems have been installed; a strict plan for regular pruning is being put into action. The cacao varieties we selected, Mayan Red and Tuma Yellow, were chosen for both fine flavor and productivity.

Our goal is to dismantle the myth that you either grow for flavor or for productivity. We believe that we can plant and grow in a more efficient way so that the two come together, and fine flavor cacao can be as productive as any other bulk cacao variety.

Is single-variety cacao environmentally sustainable? And does it guarantee a steady income for cacao farmers that grow it?

To us, farmers’ livelihood comes before environmental sustainability. Not because we don’t care about the environment, but because we believe that only once the livelihood of farmers is taken care of, then the farmers can think of taking better care of the land and the environment.

If farmers are not making a livable income, they will not be incentivized to take care of their land and the surrounding environment. If they have to struggle every day just to meet their basic needs, how can they care to implement sustainable farming practices?

The Xoco Gourmet team visiting partnering farmers.

Single-variety cacao is both environmentally and socially sustainable, because our partnering growers are incentivized to grow fine cacao, care for it, using sustainable farming practices that will make their land prosperous and biodiverse, and of course paid the best price for their efforts. Some partnering farmers have been with Xoco Gourmet for the past ten years, and we witnessed the improvement of the livelihoods all along. As expected, getting paid well to grow good cacao also had a domino effect on them practicing sustainable farming and taking care of their land.

How do you see single-variety cacao in the current market? Is it a growing niche or a descendent practice?

To be honest, in the current chocolate market we feel pretty lonely in what we are doing. The only cacao producers to our knowledge that are growing single-variety cacao that is fine flavor are Cacao Betulia in Colombia and the Franceschis in Venezuela, and possibly Hacienda Victoria in Ecuador. Many others are growing single-variety cacao, but only for productivity and not fine flavor, like the CCN-51 variety.

As mentioned previously, single-variety cacao requires a bigger investment upfront compared to seed-planted cacao, so many companies might not be able or want to sustain such burdens. This is a pity, since single-variety cacao can be the basis for innovations in the cacao industry, that hasn’t seen any improvements for a long time, if ever. Again, only when you study a homogenous batch of cacao beans with the same genetics you can collect accurate data for better protocols and techniques.

If more companies started to grow and study single-variety cacao, the industry could really take big steps ahead, and simply make a better product that people would pay more for and hence create some positive dynamics to benefit people and environment.

You are now making chocolate couverture from the same single-variety cacao that you grow, and you are selling it to pastry chefs in renowned European and Japanese restaurants. Is it hard to make pastry chefs understand not only fine cacao, but more specifically single-variety cacao?

Actually no, they get it right away. They can taste the great difference from the dull, industrialized chocolate immediately and they also understand what we do with grafting. This is because what we have done has been done for hundreds of years in other fruits. It would be absurd to think of making a great wine without being in control of the flavor of the grapes and grow for variety, for example.

These exceptional talents have dedicated their lives to naturality, trying to get the best flavors out of the best raw materials to deliver a truly special food experience. Especially Michelin-star pastry chefs are a “special breed” and don’t like to compromise on the materials they use. They want to be pioneers and trendsetters, distancing themselves from the mainstream, always wanting undiscovered foods that are hard to find.

Fermented banana and caramel, crystallized, sorbet, ganache and dehydrated Mayan Red 70% by pastry chef Daniel Sode Kruse in Denmark.

We have had tremendous success so far in Copenhagen, London and Tokyo, although we have only just started. We hope that, once these trendsetters will start using our chocolate couverture, more dessert professionals will follow, setting a high standard for the entire industry. What we can offer them is simply the best, purest flavor couverture on the market, bar none.

What are the future plans for Xoco Gourmet?

We are very focused on working with the high-end chefs and continuing to develop and improve flavors. Product development is also a high priority as we introduce other varieties. The first introduction is Tuma Yellow than has a very nice citric fruitiness.

Our Chief Chocolatier Diana Cruz will keep experimenting with our single-variety cacaos, roasting, grinding and conching in different machines, ovens and equipment to explore all the possible nuances and interpretations of our beans. Basically, we want to keep improving the quality of our chocolate couverture range every day.

At origin, the long-term goal is to develop more flavor varieties and establish more farms. As mentioned before, our aim is to find more productive farming techniques that can increase quantity while continuing to improve flavors, and being lightyears ahead of big chocolate.