Chocolate Event Details Set

SFMV Members and Friends are invited to the Mansion View Inn, 2035 Collingwood, at 7 PM on Tuesday March 3rd to meet Enrique Cerda, a member of the Kallari Association in Ecuador, whose Kallari Chocolate bars were recently launched at Whole Foods stores in the U.S. Cerda will be traveling with a translator, Rebecca Roebber, an intern from the University of Oregon

The Kallari Association is a cooperative of over 850 Quichua families in Napo Province in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Recognizing that most of the profit is to be made from sales of chocolate bars, not the cacao beans, the Quichua people created a cooperative where they would have more control over revenues. The Kallari Association, with its self-reliant governance and innovative economic model, is nothing short of revolutionary in the global chocolate industry. Cacao production provides the Quichua people with a viable income so they have the economic resources to resist logging their forests or succumb to the short-term riches offered by petroleum extraction. A full 100 percent of profits from sales of the chocolate bars are returned to the Kallari Association.

Chocolate Can Be Good, Clean And Fair - Learn How

On Tuesday March 3rd, SFMV will host Kallari chocolatier Enrique Cerda and intern Rebecca Roebbler, who will be visiting Toledo to share the techniques of organic cacao production and artesanal chocolate making.

The talk and tasting will be held at 7 PM at a location to be announced. The cost will be $10 per member, $20 for non-members.

Participants will also have the opportunity to sample various chocolates in a blind tasting, including several gourmet, organic, fair trade, and single origin dark chocolates.

The Kallari Association is the first indigenous organization of cacao growers to receive 100% of the proftis from their own line of chocolate bars.

Kallari cacao growers transport their cacao harvest to a nearby factory in Quito Ecuador. The Amazon beans are processed when they are still fresh, only weeks after the harvest. Kallari is one of the few chocolate bars made without the typical Methyl Bromide fumigation of cacao beans prior to export, weeks spent in airtight shipping containers and months/years spent in storage as brokers await price hikes in cacao or chocolate makers churn out bars.