WEAVE 70% Coverture Chocolate Drops - 100g

Cacao Content: 70% coverture

Ingredients: Cacao (Whole Beans & Cacao Butter) (70%), Sugar.

One of our Weavers, Oonagh Browne (founder of The Cacao Ambassador) has been journeying through the Pacific for over four years, working on the ground with farming communities as a vision formed for true change for the over 2.5 million cacao farmers who live in poverty in the Pacific and only have the bulk cocoa market to sell beans into. Oonagh saw farm after farm of non harvested cacao, youth leaving the villages, and farming communities who had harvested cacao for sometimes over 100 years without ever consuming their own cacao.

At the Pacific Cacao & Chocolate Show in Auckland in 2022, Oonagh shared with many companies who attended the need for change and that the craft chocolate industry, although beautiful, would not create the impact needed for real change in the Pacific and the livelihoods of the cacao farmers.

One craft chocolate company called her within a few days and asked the question ‘what can we do, we see buying 8-10 sacks of beans a year is not enough’, and there the Weave story began to flower.

Mike and Simone of Raglan Chocolate joined Oonagh and together they created a vision of making a couverture chocolate that was pure, delicious, and would create real impact within the Pacific. Oonagh asked her friend Donna, a fellow EHF Fellow, if she would help guide them in forming the company. Donna fell in love with the vision, gave hours of her time, and soon became the fourth member and shareholder of the team.

The biggest part of the project was how to raise the capital to purchase the equipment required. The expertise on the art of chocolate making we had, but we needed speciality equipment to make couverture chocolate from the whole cacao bean. On one of Oonagh’s working trips to Papua New Guinea, she rang the team and said ‘How about we produce here in Port Moresby at the Paradise Foods chocolate factory – the equipment is old but I know with our skills we can do it. And it will create another level of positive impact, producing in the country of origin’. And so enters Paradise as our contract manufacturers and Karina, their general manager, who is a legend on every level.

From this point many versions of our recipe went flying between Raglan and Christchurch as Mike led the recipe development and Oonagh the experience of working with couverture chocolate. Many taste buds were included, every sample amazing, but we were looking for the perfect couverture chocolate, in flavour, fluidity and amazingness.

On one visit to Raglan to have a team meeting, Donna invited another amazing EHF fellow to join us for lunch, Tesh (founder of Raglan Food Co and The Values Trust). Of course the conversation turned to chocolate and how our missing skills in the team were in branding, sales and marketing. Tesh shared that being part of a purpose-led chocolate company was always a lifetime dream of hers, and stepped in as our fifth team member and shareholder. And so the team was complete; passionate, determined, joyful and skilled as a whole to ensure Weave Cacao is delivering the vision of empowering our farming communities and creating a new paradigm in chocolate.