Vietnamese Origins

How it all started.     

Belvie chocolate was cofounded in 2015 by Ms. Jannie Ha Tran (Vietnamese) and Marc Vanborren (Belgian).

“First, as we are chocolate addicts and living in the south of Vietnam where fine Trinitario trees are growing next to the door, we started making our own chocolate and slowly came the idea to share our passion with the rest of the world.

Secondly, understanding the cacao plantations in Vietnam are in a decline, and being from a Vietnamese farmers family we decided to do something on this by producing a high end product next to the plantations and by the same time helping the planters with a decent income as we buy the beans directly at an advantageous price.

Our mission in the chocolate world

Our mission is to make fine tree to bar, bean to bar chocolate with as ingredient only cacao beans and cane sugar and some cacao butter from the same origin. We are not using Soya or any other lecithin. Regarding the process of making chocolate we want to make chocolate from each terroir in Vietnam. Only single terroir dark chocolate. We found the terroir is very important in the development of the flavour of the final chocolate. The same kind of trinitario beans growing in different terroirs are giving a complete different and sometimes diametric opposite flavour.

Our mission is also to develop the cacao plantations in South Vietnam in order to preserve the farmers to cut the cacao trees and give them a more than reasonable income.”

Read more of Belive’s story here

Vincent Mourou left a successful advertising career in San Francisco to find himself in Vietnam. Instead, he found Samuel Maruta, a recovering banker living in Saigon with his wife and two kids. During a camping trip in the jungle in 2010, they quickly decided to make a break for it.

After googling “cacao plantation” Sam and Vincent set course for a farm in Ba Ria Province with no address. On the ferry ride back to Saigon, they vowed to start a company called Marou Faiseurs de Chocolat. Armed with nothing but a blender, an oven, and cake tins—they got to work in Sam’s kitchen.

Marou rely on a tight network of small farmers from whom they buy the best beans, one bag at a time, for a premium price. Marou roasts this cacao with care so you can taste their hard work and the terroir of each provincial origin.

Marou Faiseurs de Chocolat was among the first “bean to bar” concerns in Asia and one of the few in the world to make chocolate at origin. What began as a dream for two wayward Frenchmen has snowballed into a brand of pure dark chocolate entirely made from Vietnam’s finest ingredients.