ABSTRACT
The brand attracted widespread media exposure due to its high price, but the business model still show a profit. Observers wondered whether the company could achieve its goal of repositioning chocolate in people’s minds while also saving the world’s oldest and rarest variety of cacao. After Jerry and his partners bought the property, Jerry immersed himself into the forest. During those early days of exploration, Jerry saw a cacao tree for the first time in the Jama-Coaque Reserve and started learning about the fruit. As Servio expected, most of the cacao trees found in Piedra de Plata had the tell-tale characteristics of a pure Nacional: golden yellow fruit pods, elliptical in shape, attenuated apex, moderate basal constriction of the pod, and reddish stamen pedicels of the flowers. To provide incentives to Ecuadorian growers to preserve Nacional Cacao, To’ak started producing single-origin chocolate made exclusively from cacao beans from these trees.
