This is a cocoa bean you can feel really good about.
First, it makes wonderful chocolate. Fine bean-to-bar makers like Blue Bandana, Hummingbird, Dandelion Chocolate, Raaka, Parliament, Cacao Sante Fe, and ChocoSol, make signature bars out of it.
Second it’s direct trade. We buy it directly from Zorzal Cacao with no middlemen. Charles Kerchner is a consulting forester who worked in the DR in the Peace Corps. He fell in love with the landscape, and at the time also fell in love with cocoa (he was a Chocolate Alchemy customer back in our early days). Working with partners and landowners in the DR, they formed a team that initiated the first private reserve in the Dominican Republic, as part of the National Protected Area System. Reserva Zorzal has become a model for private landowners to participate in landscape-level conservation.
Third it’s organic. Zorzal Cacao has a story that goes well beyond just being organic and direct trade. Reserva Zorzal has set aside 70% of its 1,019 acres as “forever wild”, devoted to the wintering grounds of Bicknell’s thrush, which of course benefits biodiversity and many other species. This rare and threatened bird breeds on remote mountaintops in the Northeastern United States. Seeing or hearing one is a rare treat even for experienced birders, and its habitat in dense hemlock forests makes even getting the chance of seeing one or hearing its nasal trill the thrill of a lifetime. It winters in the DR, where it is called the Zorzal de Bicknells, in the dense cloud forest, and because its habitat is shrinking both in its wintering grounds and breeding grounds, cooperative efforts between conservation organizations in the United States and the DR are forging real progress in maintaining populations of this rare songbird.
