Mission Chocolate Celebrates Brazilian Ingredients
By David Nilsen
Arcelia Gallardo of Mission Chocolate in São Paolo, Brazil, started her chocolate journey over six thousands miles to the northwest in San Francisco, California. As a pastry chef in the early 2000s, she worked with chocolate often, and eventually fell in love with chocolate’s main ingredient—cacao—and the chocolate-making process itself. She decided she wanted to become a chocolate maker. The only problem was deciding where.
She wanted to move to a cacao-growing region of the world, and narrowed her choice to Brazil and Mexico. She chose to challenge herself by taking the hardest road.
“I speak Spanish. All my family is Mexican. For me, it wasn’t a challenge going to Mexico,” she explains. “I decided on Brazil, a country I had never been to. I didn’t speak Portuguese. I didn’t know anyone.”
While waiting on her visa to move to Brazil, Arcelia took a job at Dandelion Chocolate. This was 2013, when bean to bar chocolate was just becoming established as an artisan industry, and people with prior experience in chocolate—in any capacity—were rare. Arcelia’s decade of work making desserts and confections allowed Dandelion to begin building on her knowledge right away. She learned the chocolate-making process, and even accompanied Dandelion’s founders on origin trips to learn about selecting cacao.
The whirlwind of a year she spent at Dandelion helped her when she moved to Brazil to start her company, but it didn’t prepare her for the realities of making bean to bar chocolate in a country where the cacao and craft chocolate industries were years behind the United States and Europe.
“I had learned to make chocolate with Dandelion equipment using Dandelion beans,” she recalls. “Then you move to a country where cacao is still years behind in quality from the Maya Mountains or Camino Verdes of the world. I knew how to make chocolate, but I didn’t know how to make chocolate with this cacao.”
Most of the cacao grown in Brazil at the time was for the commodity market and wasn’t of sufficient quality for the two-ingredient dark single origin bars that formed the background of bean to bar chocolate at the time. Arcelia and some colleagues formed the fledgling Brazilian bean to bar trade group, Associação Bean to Bar Brasil, and brought down American chocolate experts like Clay Gordon and John Nanci to teach classes and evaluate Brazilian cacao. These talks were helpful, but the feedback wasn’t encouraging to the group’s desire to put Brazil on the map as both a fine flavor cacao origin and a craft chocolate destination.
“Everyone had the same response: There’s no such thing as good Brazilian cacao. There’s no such thing as good Brazilian chocolate.”
Arcelia and her friends knew they were starting at ground level, but there was nowhere to go but up.
Better Chocolate Needs Better Cacao
If Brazilian chocolate was going to improve, the work had to start with Brazilian cacao.
“We had to work from the bottom up,” she says. “We had to work with the farmers. We had to try to get information on fermenting, on drying, on harvesting.”
It took years, but bean to bar chocolate makers working in concert with farmers yielded results. Both sides approached the process with humility, curiosity, and dedication, and the work eventually paid off. The Brazilian bean to bar chocolate industry is thriving, and excellent Brazilian chocolate is now available here in North America.
“We now have good cacao, and we now have a little over 200 bean to bar chocolate makers,” Arcelia reports. “70-80% of them are women.”
Arcelia is quick to highlight two particular origins that have played a significant role in her work at Mission Chocolate: Fazenda Camboa in the state of Bahia, and Amazônia from Pará. Fazenda Camboa is the largest organic farm in Brazil, and began working with bean to bar makers early on to improve their cacao.
“They didn’t want to be pigeonholed into selling to the commodity market just because those were the only buyers at the time,” she says. “They were one of those that listened very early in 2017.”
The farm providing Arcelia’s Amazônia beans began growing cacao thanks to a government program that incentivized farmers to move to the Amazon to restore rainforest that had been overgrazed by cattle. The farm ultimately taught its neighbors to grow good cacao as well.
These farms are now providing unique cacao with distinct characteristics. The days of all Brazilian cacao being of commodity value are long gone—a development some told Arcelia would likely never come.
“How could there just be one terroir?,” Arcelia wondered when faced with that warning. “That’s not possible. It just meant we hadn’t found it yet.”
Celebrating Brazilian Flavors
While Mission’s single origin bars are now delicious, Arcelia turned to inclusion chocolate early in her journey as a way to compensate for the still-developing quality of regional cacao. Fortunately, she had plenty of fascinating ingredients to choose from.
“I’m in one of the most biodiverse countries in the world,” she recalls thinking, brainstorming ways to make her chocolate stand out. “What can I do that other chocolate companies cannot do? I decided that I was going to make chocolate with ingredients nobody else in the world was using and that were native to Brazil. It really started to become my mission to create a product that was not only good, but that would tell the story of Brazil culturally, geographically, and gastronomically.”
She’s accomplished that with bars using Brazilian ingredients like cupuaçu—the fruit of the theobroma grandiflorum tree, a close relative of cacao—and baru nut, which grows wild in the region and has to be hand-foraged by families for collection. These bars have not only distinguished Mission Chocolate, but have introduced those of us in other parts of the world to Brazilian ingredients we likely never would have tasted otherwise. Arcelia encourages her fellow makers in Brazil to celebrate the natural bounty they have at their fingertips.
“Europeans and Americans and Canadians are going to other countries for inspiration, and you’re here. You have it. It’s yours. Use it,” she explains. “Why do you want to be the same when you could be unique? That was my guiding light. If the chocolate bar already exists, I’m not making it. There’s too many ingredients in Brazil to still be explored for me to just waste my time on something that already exists.”
Looking Back, Looking Forward
Arcelia has come a long way since those early days of trying to make good chocolate with beans that weren’t up to the task. While it was heartbreaking at the time, she credits the honesty—and encouragement—of her chocolate-loving friends with spurring the improvement that brought her and the Brazilian bean to bar scene to where they are today.
“I feel that the best thing that everyone did for me in the beginning was to tell me that my chocolate was bad,” she says with a laugh.
A quote like that is only comforting when “bad” is a long way in the rearview mirror. Arcelia Gallardo of Mission Chocolate is making some of the best and most unique chocolate in the world, and she’s looking ahead to what’s next—for Mission, and for Brazilian chocolate.