— Commited to shining a great light on its Mesoamerican roots, Vai is in for sharing the love of cacao!
It’s a story of patience, determination, true friendships and respect of the land and what it gives us.
Vai Cacao is an Italy-based brand, their office and facility are located in Olbia, Sardinia.
The founders, Elisa & Juan-Rafael, debuted their venture in 2016 in quite an interesting way.
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It’s already getting intriguing for the cacao afficionados out there, as you may know that this region of the world was home of many ancient civilizations such as Mayas or Toltecs. Those people valued cacao very highly, in a way that our westerner’s mind is today unable to properly translate.
It remains to this day the home of native communities such as Nahua, Pipil or Lencas, whom inherited priceless knowledge and traditions from the cultures mentionned above.
An indelible imprint that influences in the most beautiful way Vai’s story, that we’re about to tell.
Everything starts from La Finca Cuyancùa, Juan-Ra’s family’s farm located in Izalco. Originally focusing on coffee, Juan-Ra’s dad started to diversify to cacao in the early 2000’s while in the meantime creating a cooperative of cacao producers. This endeavor was then followed by the building of a post-harvest facility, ensuring all the freshly harvested beans from the cooperative high quality and consistent fermentation and drying practices.
Un terre fertile pour l'ambition d'Elisa et Juan-Ra.
It allowed them to quickly broaden their cacao range.
Today they offer not less than 7 different single origins, including 4 of them coming from single farms in El Salvador.
They then established not only one of the biggest range on the market of ceremonial cacao, but also the biggest Mesoamerican imprinted cacao choice, as the Salvadorans are sitting besides Nicaraguan, Guatemalan and Costa Rican cacaos, all three coming from cooperatives of smallholder farms.
This comes from creating an empowering local dynamic, relying on direct-trade that comes with friendships, benefiting from the experience of each link involved in order to be able to promote a pure and sincere product.
This purity is obviously kept alive when comes the time for Elisa and Juan-Ra to transform their much loved beans into ceremonial cacao.
A virtual tour of their manufactory immersed us in their reality. One of an organically growing brand transforming beans into paste through a gentle and thoughtful process. Each step perfomed is kept minimal. From roasting at low temperatures to slowly and « shortly » stone-grinding. No conching, no tempering here, the minimum is done with the aim to preserve the paste from being refined too much in order to preserve what it has to offer.
And as a final word, an abstract of Vai Cacao’s mission, in their own terms :
« We believe we can help building a better world and overcome the trade models that unfortunately marked the previous centuries, especially with regard to cacao treated as a commodity and not as a food specialty. We want to break the classic trading methods that have only benefited countries with stronger economies, leaving behind those who produce this extraordinary tropical fruit. To do this, however, we need to help people understand about this world. »
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