By Jecca Berta

Maya Mountain Cacao is one of our oldest partners. We’ve been buying beans from them since 2013. Their centralized fermentation became a pioneering social-enterprise model for smallholder farming, and Emily Stone — founder of both Maya Mountain Cacao and Uncommon Cacao — was integral to that process. We sat down with Emily and our Cocoa Sourcing Manager, Ron, to learn about Maya Mountain’s evolution, and a brand-new three-bar set honoring that journey.

Emily, you spent several years living in Belize and Guatemala. Is chocolate what led you there? How did you become interested in cacao? 

Emily: I grew up very passionate about chocolate and desserts. For my first independent school project in fifth grade, I wrote a cookbook called Desserts Around the World, then I did my seventh-grade science project on cupcakes. As I continued with school and started my career, I focused on social and environmental activism. While doing that work, I reconnected with chocolate. 

I was working on a campaign to help Hershey’s bring more Fair Trade certification into their supply chain, and I came to see how much room for improvement there was in terms of impact on farmers and sustainability. I was 25 at the time, working for an organization based in Boston and learning about who was going above and beyond in terms of supply-chain practices. That led me to Taza Chocolate. I ended up setting up a meeting with their founder, Alex Whitmore. He shared with me that he had just come back from Belize, where he had been getting to know farmers. This was a region that held a lot of interest in terms of cacao, but there was really no supply chain connecting smallholder farmers to the U.S. market.

Taza started in 2006 and had been struggling to find high-quality cacao sources that were organically certified and grown by smallholder farmers. Alex was going all over trying to find suppliers. After that meeting, I quit my job that same day. A couple of weeks later, I was on a plane to Belize.

I arrived in Belize in late October of 2010. The idea was to start Belize’s first centralized fermentation and drying operation to supply what was a very fledgling bean-to-bar sector in the U.S. At the time, Belize had organic certification, but all that cacao was being sold to Mondelēz for the Green & Black’s line at low prices and without a clear focus on quality. There were no chocolates being made with one-hundred-percent Belize cacao outside of Belize. 

The more I learned about the importance of quality and flavor, I understood how higher prices attached to quality can enable a really positive market cycle. Creating a consistent high-quality cacao seemed to unlock opportunities to create more sustainable market access for farmers based on the inherent quality of the beans they were producing, rather than just a certification checklist. 

So when you first started work in Belize, were the farmers doing all the fermenting and drying themselves?

Emily: Correct. Their farms were typically a thirty-minute to a two-hour walk from their homes in the hills around the villages. The farmers already had a huge amount of work — in hilly, jungle terrain. They would have to harvest the pods, crack them open, carry the cacao down on their backs to their homes, and then ferment and dry the cacao at their homes. This meant at least a two-week process (fermentation takes five to seven days), with every farmer doing it a little bit differently. Some had fermentation boxes inside homes, some outside, some in sheds — all with different sizes and different protocols. 

After fermentation, they’d dry the cacao as well, on tarps or pieces of zinc roof or cement patios outside their homes. This required people from the family to stay home to constantly be on top of the cacao. They had to watch for rain, chickens, dogs, other animals, and also had to protect the beans from contamination, mold, and insect infestation. Once the cacao was dry enough, they’d pack it into buckets or bags and load it onto a bus to take it to the buying depot, which was open only one day a week. They’d stand in line and wait for the cacao to be cut-tested. If it passed the buyer’s approval, they would get a check. If it didn’t, either because the ferment wasn’t complete or there was mold or some other form of quality issue, then they would have to try to sell it in their village, or over the border in Guatemala.

When I arrived in Belize, farmers were not that excited about growing cacao. It was a frustrating and annoying crop. It took a lot of time, and the opportunity cost meant that kids or wives had to stay at home, and couldn’t do other income-generating activities. 

The quality wasn’t great either. There was a really wide variety of quality. The idea I was bringing was: We’re going to do this differently, and focus on premium-quality cacao. We need to change the way the industry works.

And part of that idea was to create a central facility to handle fermentation and drying? 

Emily: Yes. When I arrived in 2010, I started out getting to know the farming community and meeting with different farmers. The land we ended up building our first production facility on was a place called Cotton Tree Lodge. One of the owners of the Lodge also had a chocolate company in Belize. He had connections with farmers and was interested in getting higher-quality cacao. So we built out on that property and started by meeting different farmers that he knew. 

We brought this idea to farmers: Sell cacao the same day you freshly harvest it. We’ll pick it up from your home, pay at least the same price you get for dried cacao, and you save time and reduce the risk of not being able to sell it. One of the first farmers I met with was Eladio Pop, who had a larger farm in Southern Belize. He had 15 kids, and a few were sitting in on the meeting. One son, Gabriel, followed me out the door and said he loved what I was pitching. He knew this was how it worked in other places, and he wanted to help. He wanted to translate our message into two Mayan languages — Q’eqchi’ and Mopan Maya — so farmers would understand what we were saying. 

Editor’s note: You can learn more about Eladio Pop in The Chocolate Farmer, a documentary filmed over the course of a year in Southern Belize.

Emily: In those first couple of months, Gabriel and I worked together to meet with hundreds of families around the Toledo district. We first bought cacao in January of 2011. We did our first organic certification that year, registering 52 families as part of our network. On our first buying day, we bought 60 pounds of cacao, which is a tiny amount, but it felt like a huge win at the time, convincing farmers to sell wet beans instead of dry, and matching that price. 

We ended up buying about half a container’s worth of cacao that year. We exported our first shipment in June of 2011 to Taza and the Mast Brothers. Then we were off to the races. By 2013, we had become the largest exporter of cacao in Belize. As soon as people started to see the value, they were on board. We started to build out a team, develop our processing facility, buy trucks, and onboard hundreds of families into our certification program. Today, essentially all cacao is bought wet in Belize. We are still the largest buyer in Belize, and we’re focused on sustainable long-term partnerships. Working with chocolate makers like Dandelion — an important partner to us for many years — has been key to Maya Mountain being able to play a sustainable role for farmers. 

When you were first pitching that approach, was there initial resistance or pushback?

Emily: There was a lot of resistance in the beginning, and for good reason. I was a young, idealistic white woman coming from the U.S. with big promises and a vision. Farmers had seen this before. Many communities across Latin America have seen projects or initiatives come in from the U.S. or other parts of the global north with big promises and then leave. Either the money runs out, or they “accomplish their mission.” There was definitely some resistance. We had to consistently make sure we weren’t over-promising. We wanted to under-promise and over-deliver. We started small and kept growing. We started bringing chocolate makers down to Belize as well, to meet with farmers directly. We wanted to be transparent about where their cacao was going, and show them that these partners around the world are in love with their cacao. We were growing something bigger than all of us. 

For readers who aren’t familiar, will you tell us about Uncommon Cacao?

Emily: I lived in Belize from 2010 to 2014 building out Maya Mountain Cacao. By 2014, we were selling to eight or ten chocolate makers in the U.S. and had a waiting list of over 35. It was a clear indication that what we were doing was working, but Belize is a really small country.

So, with Uncommon Cacao, you wanted to apply that model to other areas? 

Emily: Yes. Our first area of expansion was Guatemala. We started Cacao Verapaz in 2014. By that time, I had learned Q’eqchi’ (the Mayan language spoken there), so that seemed like the right way to expand. I started to backpack around Guatemala one week out of the month, just getting to know the communities. I ended up moving to Guatemala in 2014. When I first moved there, a woman named Maya Granit — who was previously with Dandelion Chocolate — began working with us in Belize. I lived in Guatemala until 2016, establishing the country’s first specialty-cacao sourcing operation in partnership with hundreds of farmers and over a dozen communities across Alta Verapaz. In 2016, I moved to the U.S. to launch the business there. Maya also played a key role in starting Uncommon Cacao in the U.S., establishing our first office in the Bay Area. We wanted to guarantee quality control, transparency, and strong customer service for our customers, so it made sense for us to manage our own sourcing in the U.S. and distribute directly to our customers. Then we started a European business in 2021, based in Amsterdam. Today we’re importing cacao from over 17 countries and supplying hundreds of chocolate makers globally, almost exclusively from smallholder farmers.

That’s incredible. Are you still traveling and meeting with farmers?

Emily: Yes, especially in Belize. Over the last few years, Maya Mountain Cacao has become a more mature organization, and the business has been sustainable and profitable. It’s been run entirely by Belizians for the last decade. The current Managing Director is Jose Coy, brother-in-law of Gabriel Pop, and overall there’s a really strong team in place. I’ve been continuing to visit, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense for the business to be owned by a foreign company. In consultation with farmers and local stakeholders, farmers decided that they wanted to form a cooperative that would acquire Maya Mountain Cacao from Uncommon Cacao. That’s what true sustainability would look like. We’re in that process now. Maya Mountain Cacao and the farmer network held a big assembly meeting in 2025 and elected the first board of the cooperative — a nine-member board, with two women who are amazing leaders in the community. It’s really exciting — it’s being covered in the news in Belize, and by local stakeholders and farmers in the industry. 

Will you tell us more about the Maya Mountain Cacao farmer network? How many farms are woman-owned / run?

Emily: We have 418 families that are members of the Maya Mountain Cacao network. Of those 418 families, 44 are represented by women farmers in 2026. This is an increase over 2025’s number of 41 female farmers. In Belize, women farmers typically either started farms on their own to generate income as single parents, or inherited them from spouses who have passed away. There are still a lot of traditional gender roles in place. Cacao farming is an area of opportunity — there are a growing number of women owning or running cacao farms. We’ve historically had women in leadership roles at Maya Mountain as well. Overall, across the Uncommon Cacao network, over 30 percent of the farmers in our network are women. We’re working on 2025 data now, but in 2024, 2,349 out of 6,311 farmers / producers were women, which is over 37 percent.!

There have been a number of challenges in Belize — fires, a volatile commodities market, and tariffs. What kind of impact did those issues have at Maya Mountain Cacao?

Emily: It’s definitely been a crazy last couple of years. The fires were really a challenge. Those happened in the middle of 2024, in May, right as cacao prices were starting to increase dramatically. Farmers in Belize didn’t harvest anything from their farms between May and June 2024 through early 2025, because the extreme heat and drought caused all of the cacao to ripen. The ripened cacao had to come off the trees, so there was a missed harvest that year. Luckily, in 2025 we had really good rains, so that ended up being one of our highest years of cacao purchasing in our history. It was a huge relief for the farmers and for Maya Mountain Cacao. 

The psychological impact of the fires was really, really tough. Farmers rely on the weather to grow the crops they literally eat every day and to make a living. The fear was palpable that year in terms of climate change. We’re now seeing a lot more funding coming into Belize to help build climate resilience for farms there — innovative irrigation, fire-management techniques. NEMO, the National Emergency Management Operation in Belize, helped the farmers who had lost farms. They received enough seedlings to replant. 

This was a real wake-up call to the government of Belize. Cacao is a long-term crop. Once trees are in the ground, they can produce for 40-plus years, but there are three years until you can start to harvest commercial quantities of cacao. The government has historically invested much more in sugarcane, citrus, and fisheries. But now, as farmers are becoming organized and are able to lobby much more effectively, that’s really helping to bring attention and resources into these indigenous communities in Southern Belize. It’s helped make cacao a priority for the national government.

Ron, what can you tell us about the new Maya Mountain Herself bar set? How did that come about? 

Ron: Nancy Matsumoto wrote a book that came out last year called Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. It looks at how women are shaping the food supply chain. There’s a chapter on Maya Mountain Cacao that features Emily. So, we thought this three-bar set would be a great way not only to taste the nuanced flavors of Maya Mountain beans, but also to honor how Emily, Maya Mountain, Uncommon Cacao, and farmers in southern Belize are really changing and improving the cocoa industry. 

What three bars are in the set? 

Ron: It features two 70% bars — one made here, one at our factory in Tokyo — and an 85% bar. All three are made with Maya Mountain beans.

Tell us about the 85% bar. Those can be tricky to make. From a production standpoint, what was that process like? 

Ron: The tricky thing about higher-percentage chocolate is you really have to rely on the beans’ flavors with less sugar. When we do profile development, we always try an 85% and a 100% for different beans. The ones that have tasted the best and the most balanced are Maya Mountain, Belize; Costa Esmeraldas, Ecuador; and Semuliki Forest, Uganda. 

What about the 70% bar from Dandelion Japan?

Ron: Maya Mountain is one of Dandelion Japan’s mainline origins. They’ve been working with those beans for a long time, just as we have. When we make that bar here in San Francisco, we tend to get a strawberry note, so it’s unusual that they get a grape flavor. But when you taste it, it does have more of a grape aroma. 

Dandelion’s been working with Maya Mountain for years. How and when did our relationship with them begin? 

Ron: In 2011, Greg (our Chocolate Sourcerer) went to Belize and got to know Emily and the team there. We first started buying cocoa from Maya Mountain in 2013, and we’ve been buying with them every year since then. They’re one of our oldest partners.

Has the quality of the beans improved over the years? 

Ron: Well, early on Maya Mountain had a stake in the ground in the bean-to-bar movement. They were consistently able to deliver quality and quantity. That level of quality can be hard when you’re working with a newer producer. They can sometimes over-promise. For any origin, there are always harvest-to-harvest flavor differences, but Maya Mountain was one of the most consistent early on, and continues to improve. 

Emily and Ron, thank you so much! We look forward to trying this new bar set. 

Check out the Maya Mountain Herself bar set here.