On Aungier Street, a hot chocolate with traceable roots

It’s almost midday on a sunny but cold Friday at Brew Lab in Aungier Street. Inside, there’s a queue.

“Can I get a latte?”

“Can I get a dirty chai, please?”

Then: “Can I have a hot chocolate?”

Order hot chocolate here and you’ll get a very particular drink, made with cacao beans that can be traced all the way to Boca do Acre, a rainforested region in the north of Brazil.

Liliane Alves, who set up the Raízes chocolate company, says she never imagined when she moved to Dublin in August 2017, that one day a specialty coffee shop would be serving her chocolate.

She had meant to come to study English and head home, she says. “But I decided to stay.”

She worked as a sous chef, then head chef, at a seafood restaurant.

But over time, she fixed on the idea of starting a business of her own. It wasn’t just about making a living, she says, but had to be something with social and environmental impact.

“That was my core value from the start,” says Alves.

A journey

In 2020, around Easter time, Alves was working with chocolate to make easter eggs for a friend.

A question from her boyfriend struck a chord. Why don’t you do something with chocolate? she remembers him asking.

It got her thinking not just about that path, but also about working with cacao from her own country, she said.

She researched suppliers, and found a cacao cooperative in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest – the supplier she works with now.

They told her to take as long as she needed to work it all out. To find a way to do what she wants, says Alves. “That’s when I decided it was worth trying.”

In June 2022, she visited the cooperative. “Cacao, chocolate training in the Acará-açu community in the Amazon with two cacao specialists,” she says.

The project employs mostly women from the area who produce Brazil nuts, açai and cacao. With the funds from visitors, they built a small chocolate factory.

Being there and seeing people live in such a respectful way with nature was a game changer, says Alves. “That’s when I realized I cannot give up.”

Bean to bar

The bean-to-bar movement has been around for almost three decades. At its core is the idea of a single-origin chocolate, produced by just one manufacturer.

“The main goal is to preserve the taste of the cocoa beans,” says Alves. It’s kind of like natural wines or specialty coffee.

“The idea of a company taking full responsibility for the cocoa beans, from the purchase to the making of the chocolate. I think it’s interesting,” says Bart Van Besien, an Oxfam policy expert on cocoa.

Big players do it differently, he says.

“Fifty percent of all cocoa [in the world] ends up in six multinationals: Mars, Ferrero, Nestle, Mondelez, Hershey’s, Lindt,” he says.

But they “don’t buy cacao from the farmers, instead they buy chocolate from traders”, he says. For big traders, think Cargill, Olam, Barry Callebaut, ECOM who buy, stock and sell cocoa.

That supply chain means that the companies “don’t take accountability for the purchasing practices, and the purchasing practices are very essential to sustainability”, says Van Besien.

Being a trusted partner to farmers from a cooperative in say the Ivory Coast or Brazil can make a difference, says Van Besien.

It gives the farmers an assured price for what they produce, rather than the rate being left to the vagaries of the international market.

“If that cooperative knows this company, that they are gonna buy you every year, they’re gonna respect their contract, they’re gonna pay at least the cost of living in their country, ” he says.

Cooperar, the cooperative with which Alves works, is in Boca do Acre, in the north of Brazil.

Communities along the Purus River work to protect and multiply native cocoa trees, collect, ferment, and dry the cocoa beans.

Alves says the work they do is meant to ensure an income for those communities, and ensure environmental preservation. “What you pay stays in those communities,” she says.

“With great social and environmental responsibility with the objective of keeping the forest standing, today we work with the involvement of 65 riverside communities along the route of more than 1000 km of Rio,” the co-op’s website says.

Real worth

Hot chocolate is €4.20 at Aungier Street.

Pricing for cocoa has been up and up in recent times. In April 2024, cocoa reached record-breaking prices.

There’s a shortage, according to research from the investment bank JP Morgan. “Climate change-induced drought has ravaged crops in West Africa, which contributes around 80% of the world’s cocoa output.”

So prices have shot up from $2,540 per metric ton in January 2024 to $7,295 per metric ton in March 2024, according to data from the US Federal Reserve bank in St Louis.

That has cracked open questions about the current system, and the normal miserly rates paid to those who grow the crop.

At the moment, 90 percent of all cacao is produced by smallholders and the cacao tree is very sensitive to disease so needs a lot of care, says Van Besien.

But despite all that labour, it has also been cheap. “It’s been so cheap that the only people willing to produce it are very poor people. If you are not so poor, you wouldn’t be using cacao,” he says.

“I think what is happening right now proves the point that paying a fair price is possible,” Van Besien said.

A cup of hot chocolate in Brew Lab starts 9,000km away, where the cooperative harvests the cocoa beans in the Amazonian forest.

Quickly, the cacao farmers travel by canoe along the Purus river to the closest production facility. “Because you have a time frame,” says Alves.

There, they put the beans in a wooden box, where they ferment at temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius. They leave the fermented beans to dry out in the open, spread on big wooden sliding tables for a few days, turning them now and then.

Once all the moisture has evaporated, the beans begin the journey to their next destination: Rathfarnham.

In Dublin, in her kitchen, Alves’s hand grinds the beans, mixes them with sugar, and tempers the chocolate.

“My chocolate only has two ingredients, cocoa (solids and butter) and Brazilian cane sugar,” she says.

At the moment, Raízes sells a 220gm bag of chocolate coins the size of €1 coins, each one 70-percent cocoa, for €20.50. They can be used for hot chocolate, for baking, or just eaten.

That Friday at Brew Lab, Renata Khedun, one of the owners but also a barista, took a spoonful of crushed chocolate, and whisked it with water until it dissolved.

She poured in milk, the foam at the top with the shape of a white rose – and handed it over the counter for the waiting customer.