The story
In March 2020, on a trip to the jungle from the UK, Caroline met Rómulo – a cacao farmer from the community of Lucerna, 100km from Puerto Maldonado, Peru. The two became friends, fell in love and defied differences in age, culture and language to be together. Thank you, cacao and your heart opening magic.
Caroline decided to live with Rómulo in Lucerna and began learning how to farm and make cacao. It was a challenging and uncomfortable time adapting to hard work in a hot, humid and insect-ridden jungle (where she was the only outsider) but it created Jungle Cacao Peru, which has been sharing its pure, organically grown cacao paste with people all over the world and within Peru since 2020.
Previously coca and coffee growers, they moved across the vast country to start life anew as cacao growers. They are hard working, skilled and dedicated farmers that have in a short space of time set up their cacao farms from scratch and gathered the expertise to farm high quality and delicious cacao.
At the moment, most of the cacao that is harvested and turned into fermented and dried cacao beans is sold onto a cooperative that then sells the beans to Nestle and other factories making candy bars and using cacao as a raw material, treating it as nothing more than a commodity and crop.
The portion of the harvest that goes into making Jungle Cacao Peru’s pure cacao paste is still very small – but we want to change this, so that we are able to use more and more of the total available harvest to make cacao paste that is bought and enjoyed by people who love, honour and respect cacao.
This is what we mean by “taking cacao out of Nestle’s hands”. That said, we do not wish to compete with Nestle on scale: this would simply be continuing the status quo of business as usual, which has been so damaging to the planet and its people.
While Caroline and Rómulo are no longer together, Jungle Cacao Peru still continues, collaborating with the families of Lucerna, who have become neighbours and friends after years living and working together in the community.
Situated in the “low jungle” of southern Peru, not too far from the border with Brazil, Lucerna is a community of less than 100 people (cacao growers and their families) who originate from the “high jungle” region of Pichari, over 1000 km due west from Lucerna.
Every step, from the cacao being planted to being harvested, fermented, dried and processed into cacao and then arriving to you is accounted for. This is unlike a lot of cacao businesses, where cacao is bought wholesale and then passes between various vendors – being re-branded several times over – before eventually arriving at the people who consume it.
“I love your cacao more than any of the various others I have tried over the years.
Not only do I love supporting your business and what you stand for, but your cacao has also inspired some deep soul transformations within myself.
The only downfall is that I can no longer drink any other cacao;
Nothing compares to the flavour, texture, and overall experience of drinking Jungle Cacao.”