Kasama Costa Esmeraldas (Ecuador) 88%

Kasama Chocolate is a group of friends from Vancouver; Stefan, Dom, Oliver and Vince, who started making small batch, bean-to-bar chocolate with cocoa from the Philippines in 2015. It all started when Vince’s dad, Mario, sent a picture of himself holding what he thought were mangoes on their small family property in the northern Philippines.  They weren’t mangoes though, they were cacao pods hanging from the branches of a cacao tree. One fateful evening, the friends decided to meet up for beers at their favourite watering hole in Vancouver, a weekly ritual at the time. Vince nonchalantly broke the news about cacao pods growing on the family property. It wasn’t a big deal until Stefan and Oliver suggested that it would be great if Mario could bring back some samples to see and taste. A month later, they had a ziplock bag full of dried, fermented cacao beans from the Cagayan Valley. And what do you do with cacao beans? You make chocolate of course! And so began their adventure into the world of bean-to-bar chocolate making. Kasama is a word which means friendship, camaraderie and collaboration. Kasama's award winning chocolate is hand-crafted in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.