The Rise of Vanuatu Cacao and Chocolate

The Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu is emerging as one of the most exciting new cacao origins in craft chocolate. It’s taken decades of hard work and dedication to get to this point, but the unique flavour and quality of Vanuatu cacao is capturing the hearts of chocolate makers and consumers around the world.

Rich History, Bright Future

Cacao has been farmed in Vanuatu for almost 200 years. It was brought there by Dutch and Spanish settlers in the mid-1800s. Exports of Vanuatu cacao began in 1910, and throughout the 20th Century, relatively small amounts of beans were sold to commodity traders, who are often more bothered about quantity than quality. The amount paid by traders is subject to a complex global financial system, but it’s usually well below what is needed for farmers to make a decent living.

Although the majority of Vanuatu’s cacao is still sold at prices well below the market rate, over the past 15 years much work has been done to improve quality and consistency, and a movement towards more expensive ‘fine flavor’ beans has slowly developed.

Olivier Fernandez surrounded by his team at Gaston Chocolat

One of the key people involved with this development is Olivier Fernandez of Gaston Chocolat in Port Vila. Fernandez previously worked in commodities trading, and when he moved to Vanuatu in 2009 with his Vanuatuan wife, he saw a lot of untapped potential in specialty cacao. “Cacao had been left dormant, except for the commodities market”, says Olivier. “We started trying to find opportunities… how to implement better processes, how to implement a system that would be more caring of the farmers.”

There are thousands of small cacao farms spread throughout the 83 islands of Vanuatu, and Fernandez works predominantly with groups in the northeast and northwest of Malekula Island. His work involves helping to improve growing, fermentation and drying methods –which improves the flavour of the beans – and then distributing the beans to overseas craft chocolate makers who are willing to pay a premium price for quality.

Weathering the Storm

The biggest challenge for farmers in Vanuatu is extreme weather, with climate change already causing dramatic changes to weather. Major cyclones used to happen roughly once a decade, whereas now they happen every 2-3 years, alongside many other freak weather events. In 2023, precipitation increased 60% from the previous year.

The reason Fernandez works with groups of farmers in the northwest and northeast of Malekula is that cyclones rarely travel down both sides of the island. “After the cyclone comes, we move all the farmers into the affected area. After we make sure they all have their houses safe and they can all have a normal life, we harvest everything that’s on the floor and can be salvaged. Then we move everyone to the areas that haven’t been affected and we finish the [cacao harvest] season.” At the end of the season, everyone goes back to the damaged area to help clean up, prune trees, and repair any damage, thus creating a balanced system of support and rehabilitation.

Initially Fernandez was focussed exclusively on cacao development and export, but due to many logistical challenges and risks, he decided to diversify the business and start making chocolate. Gaston Chocolat launched in 2017 and has since won multiple international awards, which has made chocolate makers around the world realize the exceptional potential of Vanuatu cacao.

Fernandez is now shipping beans to New Zealand and North America, and is soon to send a first shipment to Europe. “We follow great examples like Kokoa Kamili [in Tanzania]. Initiatives like this take decades to set up and make a name, so we try and learn from that. We’d love to follow that path and be identified as a top quality cacao supplier from the Pacific”.

Beans to Bars

Vanuatu’s other main chocolate maker is Aelan Chocolate, also in Port Vila. The company is part of ACTIV, a not-for-profit organisation that supports local communities across Vanuatu by facilitating fair trade and sustainable incomes. ACTIV founder Sandrine Wallez wanted to show cacao growers that “by making quality you can get a better price. It’s changed the mindset of producers… it’s an incentive for them to better look after their plantations.”

Aelan Chocolate offers a range of single origin dark chocolate bars that highlight cacao from the islands of Epi, Malekula, Malo and Santo, as well as blended 70% bars with added local flavours, such as ginger, turmeric and coconut. The majority of these bars are sold to tourists, but when the COVID pandemic essentially shut down tourism in 2021, Aelan Chocolate’s sales dropped dramatically.

Roasting cacao beans in Vanuatu — Cacao beans photo credit Aelan Chocolate

Many of their suppliers were left with a surplus of beans, and one farmer was particularly struggling, as he had no other crops to sell. To help, Wallez suggested they could make chocolate for him to sell in his local area, on the island of Santo. “He sold a lot of chocolate. There was very high demand from the local people for local chocolate, despite it being a little bit more expensive… they were surprised by the quality and they enjoyed it.”

Aelan Chocolate received funding from the Government of Vanuatu and the PHAMA Plus program, enabling them to open a ‘shared factory’ facility and make chocolate on behalf of twelve cacao farms, all from different islands. “Now the farmers are exposed, they have to make high quality cacao,” says Wallez. “Otherwise, they will have shit chocolate. It’s an incentive for [the farmers] to make better cacao, but also a better income.” Turning their beans into chocolate gives farmers a new revenue stream, alongside selling cacao.

New Zealand Launch

Kakasi chocolate bars photo credit Kakasi

Recently-launched Kakasi Chocolate is made at Aelan Chocolate’s new shared production facility. When attending the Vanuatu National Week of Agriculture in 2023, Kakasi founder Eric Kalterikia felt he was seeing a lot of cacao beans, but not enough chocolate. Eric enthuses “I’m a chocolate lover! I asked a lot of questions to the cocoa projects and the Department of Industry… I wanted to create Vanuatu-made chocolate!”

Kalterikia is in the process of starting his own cacao farm, but at the moment he sources beans from a handful of neighboring farms and transports them to Aelan Chocolate. Through his connection with Wallez, he unexpectedly had the opportunity to launch Kakasi Chocolate at Chocstock craft chocolate festival in Wellington, New Zealand. Being so inexperienced, and up against stiff competition, he didn’t expect to sell a lot of chocolate, but by lunchtime on the second day of the festival he completely sold out. “We were only accepting cash, so a lot of people had to run to the ATM. For us, for a customer to do that in New Zealand was huge! It was really emotional.”

Kalterikia studied business in New Plymouth, NZ, so he was excited to return after ten years and show his former classmates his new company. When he returned to Vanuatu, Kakasi Chocolate’s Chocstock launch had been all over the news, creating huge demand for the product. “It creates value around the brand. We tell people that we sold out in New Zealand and they say ‘I wanna try it! Where are you selling it?’”

Long Term Relationships

Luke Spencer with dried Vanuatu cocoa photo credit Spencer Cocoa Australia

Another key player in Vanuatu craft chocolate is Luke Spencer of Spencer Cocoa in Australia. Spencer managed a large cacao plantation in Vanuatu for three years, before returning home to Mudgee, New South Wales, in 2012 and starting a small-scale bean-to-bar factory. Spencer exclusively makes single origin Vanuatu chocolate, and he regularly visits the families in Malekula Island who supply his beans. “We’ve got about ten families we buy from now,” says Luke. “We could probably buy cheaper beans from elsewhere; we may be able to buy better beans from elsewhere, but we’ve worked really hard to improve the quality… not a lot of other chocolate makers would go to that extent.”

In a former life, Spencer was a viticulturist, and that experience enabled him to quickly understand and improve systems for growing, fermenting, and drying cacao. Initially, the beans he received had funky off-notes (from being poorly fermented) and smoke taint (from being dried over the fire), but after more than a decade of work, his 72% dark chocolate now has beautiful flavors of tropical fruit, toffee, caramel, and malt. As he visits the farmers regularly, Spencer can share the results of their efforts. “I know it’s a bit of a cliché now in the industry, but for growers to taste their chocolate – it’s still a pretty special thing to do. These guys had never tasted their own chocolate before we did it.”

Tipping Point

Over the past 15-20 years, the craft chocolate movement has convinced consumers that it’s worth paying more for exceptional quality chocolate. Now, with cacao prices at an all-time high, and the vastly increasing costs of everything required to produce chocolate, the price of a bar arguably needs to increase again, if the industry is to survive.

“When I see you can get top quality bars for $10-$15, and people think that’s expensive…,” says Olivier Fernandez. “How much would you pay for a top bottle of wine? Thousands of dollars! I don’t think the work of a farmer or a chocolate maker is any different or less valuable than the work of a winemaker… The fight should not be to lower the price, the fight should be to educate the end consumer.”

When you understand the decades of hard work, development, investment and education that have gone into cultivating fine flavour cacao in Vanuatu, that $10-$15 price tag becomes unfathomably low. If consumers could see the incredible adversities that are regularly overcome to produce that chocolate – the cyclones and freak weather events; the logistical nightmares and cost of transporting beans around the country (let alone around the world) – they’d probably be willing to pay more.

The fact that a top quality, award-winning bar of Vanuatu chocolate can end up on a shop shelf in North America, Europe or Asia is nothing short of a miracle, and thanks to the work of some incredibly passionate and industrious cacao pioneers, that miracle is becoming more of a reality. So next time you see a bar made with beans from Vanuatu, don’t hesitate to open your wallet. It’s a rare opportunity to enjoy a tropical flavour journey decades in the making.