By Jecca Berta

The practice of drinking cacao dates back thousands of years in Mexico. Traditions held by the Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs influence Mexican culture today. Yet much of the country’s cacao remains unfermented. Revival Cacao, founded by Alejandro Zamorano in 2017, is rethinking tradition, with the goal of introducing their beans to the craft chocolate market. Meet our newest origin: Río Samaria. We’re joined by Ron, our Cocoa Sourcing Manager, and Nate, Senior Chocolate Maker, to learn more. 

Let’s start with the chocolate. What’s the flavor profile of our new Río Samaria bar?

Nate: It’s very classic dark chocolate in flavor, with an interesting fruity note that was a pleasant surprise when we were developing it. I taste more of a stone fruit or a plum variation, but other team members have called out notes of topical fruit. For me, it has a kind of woody, earthy finish. It’s an interesting combination of flavors.

Ron: One thing that was interesting when we started developing the flavor was the fruit note was persistent — in a good way. It really wanted to come through. We want the beans to lead us to the flavor of the resulting chocolate, and it was very clear that these particular beans wanted to highlight that fruit note. There are certain steps in our process that tend to tone down fruit aromas in chocolate. That didn’t happen here.

Tell us more about that. 

Nate: Roasting beans develops the most flavor. Conching in the rotary conche will mellow everything out and make it a bit easier to eat. So after 36 hours in the conche, the taste is a bit more mellow. With this origin, even with the 36 hours of conching, it was still very fruity. 

When our Kitchen team ran some tests with this origin for our Mission Hot Chocolate, they called out the fruity notes as well. They’re still able to come through even in that scenario, which isn’t always the case. 

What are the bar’s tasting notes?

Nate: Plum jam, champurrado, and tobacco leaf. The plum is that stone fruit flavor — fresh stone fruit, or some teammates found it tastes like cooked fruit. Champurrado is a Mexican drink that has a lot of delicious ingredients, including corn. Chocolate is the main ingredient. Tobacco leaf is the flavor Ron and I were the most excited about. We were trying to figure out a way to describe the earthy note — the woodiness and leafiness. Tobacco leaf is a good representation of that. 

Ron: It was kind of a coincidence that we landed on champurrado as well. While tasting, we did get some callouts for grain and breadiness. The corn representing the breadiness seemed like a natural fit. 

Nate: And choosing a drink (champurrado) instead of a chocolate bread is a subtle nod to most of Mexico’s cacao being grown for drinking chocolate. It’s a different approach to cacao compared to other countries, even the agricultural countries that grow it. 

Mexico’s cacao history dates back centuries. What’s the country’s current state of cacao?

Ron: Mexico imports more cocoa than they can grow, because they consume so much of it. What is super cool about Mexico is that while most of the chocolate they consume is candy (like America and elsewhere), they also drink a lot of their chocolate. The main product that they make chocolate for is chocolate drinks. There are hundreds of recipes that are regional or from families handed down generations. That’s something that has always appealed to me about Mexico’s connection to chocolate.

The cacao that’s used for drinks is unfermented. Instead it follows the lavado process. Basically, the cacao pod is harvested and cracked open, the beans are taken out, and the pulp is washed off. Then the beans are left to dry in the sun, before being roasted and ground for drinks. That’s the main reason why, for many decades, you typically couldn’t get cocoa from Mexico. They didn’t have enough cocoa to export to other countries, because they only produced around 27,000 metric tonnes, and they don’t have a tradition of fermentation. Chocolate made with poorly fermented cocoa is not very good. So for a long time, Mexico wasn’t a good source of cocoa for craft chocolate makers. There weren’t enough people who knew how to do good fermentation. 

Nate: Revival Cacao would be one of the first to tell you that the vast majority of beans in Mexico are still used for drinking chocolate. Alejandro and the team are trying to change that. They are starting to ferment and make really good beans that we’re excited about. It’s still very rare to get fermented and dried beans from Mexico for bean-to-bar chocolate.

So Revival Cacao is fermenting their beans, which is a break from tradition in Mexico. 

Ron: Most cocoa produced in Mexico isn’t fermented. Revival Cacao, founded by Alejandro Zamorano, both ferments and produces lavado. Their mission is to introduce fine-flavored cocoa to the world craft chocolate market. In order to do that, he had to teach a lot of people about fermentation. 

How did you first meet Alejandro, and how did he get started? 

Ron: Alejandro, who is Spanish, has a background in the fresh produce industry. He found himself in Mexico and thought about starting a chocolate drink company, then discovered he couldn’t find high quality cocoa, which led him to trying to make it himself. This was in maybe 2018. He started working with farmers and teaching them how to ferment. He was producing small amounts of cocoa for many many years. 

We always wanted to source beans from Mexico but couldn’t find good beans. Over the years, I’d reach out to different people to try to find a source, and eventually got connected to Alejandro through Cuna de Piedra, a chocolate maker in Mexico City. That was in 2021. He would send me samples, and we kept in touch over the years. 

Geographically, Río Samaria is in an area laced with rivers and lagoons. Cacao trees are part of a larger agroforestry system in that environment. Does cacao like a lot of water? What else grows there?

Ron: Cacao trees do like a lot of humidity. It’s a tropical plant. It likes wet but well-drained soil, so Río Samaria is a great environment. It also likes semi-shade, so most cacao grown has some sort of canopy over it. Their cacao grows under the shade of bananas and plantains, and alongside hibiscus, limes, and heirloom chiles.

Nate, you roast this harvest for 36 minutes, the longest in Dandelion’s history. Can you tell us how you arrived at that? 

Nate: In general, the proper roast profile depends on the beans. It really changes from origin to origin. Because this was a brand-new bean that we had not worked with before, we had to start from zero. For these beans, I started with the time and temperature in the roaster for the small batch of Agua Escondida, Mexico chocolate we had made in 2023 at Valencia.

Is Agua Escondida what we used for the Chocolatera Collection with Hijita?

Nate: Yes. For Río Samaria, we started at 240°F for 27 minutes. From there, I tried different times and temperatures to determine what flavors were possible. I think we did 15 different small-scale roaster tests with 1-kilo batches of chocolate. We start on the 5-kilo roaster, which is smaller than our big scale but still can roast a lot of beans. After 27 minutes, I tried 30 minutes. Then went up 10 degrees, and tasted all those. Even with those minor changes of 27 versus 30 minutes, you can taste the difference between the roasted beans. And that’s even more pronounced at the chocolate-making stage. 

I think we did three or four different rounds with the small roaster that we made into chocolate, and tasted them with the team. Based on that feedback, we did additional roast profiles with the goal of making it more fruity. 

My personal approach is, if there’s a fruity note or a woody note — in this case both — I try to highlight that and make it stand out as much as  possible. I try to make the fruity flavors even more intense or fruity. Once we moved onto the big-scale 70-kilo roaster, we had to figure out how to replicate the flavors we enjoyed on the small scale. It changes quite a bit with the larger batch size. That’s partly how we arrived at the 36-minute roast, because a larger batch of beans needs more time in the roaster. The winning small-batch roast profile was 250°F for 30 minutes, and the big roaster ended up being 36 minutes at the same temperature.

On top of that, my hypothesis going into this was that a longer time in the roaster will hopefully roast the beans more evenly and thoroughly throughout. That was kind of the goal, to have the beans evenly roasted throughout the whole bean, not just the outside, but down to the very center of the bean. It has to do with heat penetration and thermodynamics. 

The fact that this is the longest in Dandelion’s history is intriguing. We had not explored long times like that, so I was trying to create a good bar and also push the limits to see what we could do. 

Aside from over-roasting or burning the beans, what’s the downside of roasting them for too long?

Nate: The first thing that would happen, is the more interesting, nuanced flavors would be removed. A lot of those fruity dynamic flavors would dissipate. 

Do we have an average roasting time across our other origins?

Nate: The previous longest roast was 30 minutes. We usually do between 25 and 30 minutes. The minimum of 25 minutes gives us enough time for the 70 kilos to get up to any of these temperatures. We physically can’t get it hot enough in less time than that.  The temperature range is usually 230 to 300°F. Our Camino Verde, Ecuador chocolate, specifically, is traditionally roasted at higher temperatures to bring out its classic chocolate and nutty flavor profile.

Our factory is in the Mission, one of San Francisco’s oldest neighborhoods, and home to a vibrant Mexican community. What does sourcing a Mexican origin mean for Dandelion given that broader context?

Ron: One of the things we’re always trying to achieve, at least on the sourcing side, is to connect people to places in the world where maybe they’ll never go to, or, in some cases,  never heard of. The cool thing about Mexico is most people in the U.S. have some kind of cultural connection to it. It’s our southern border. We eat a lot of Mexican food in the U.S., and a lot of people who live here who are from Mexico. If we can get great cocoa beans from them, it’s a no brainer to do that.

Do we have plans to use these beans in any of our drinks and confections?

Nate: Yes, the main plan that I was very conscious of and excited about during this development process is replacing the Madagascar chocolate in our Mission Hot Chocolate with Mexico-based beans. We’re doing that with our Mission Mocha too. Both of those drinks are now made with Río Samaria at all of our cafés. 

During our test roasts, I brought some chocolate to Lisa and the Kitchen team, and they were super excited about it. We were talking with different departments and teams throughout the process, because we have so many different plans for this origin. The Confections team is excited to have a new origin as well. 

Ron: I’ve always wanted for us to use Mexican cocoa for our Mission Hot Chocolate. The problem was, we were never able to get enough beans. I was having a conversation with Alejandro about that and asked if he thought he could deliver on that.

He sent me a photo of one of our empty Mission Hot Chocolate glass bottles. He said he keeps that on his desk as a talisman, and that it had always been his hope that he could use those beans for that specific drink. So we bought pretty much everything that he had available. It was his biggest sale to date.

Amazing.

Nate: Ron is underselling how long-term this dream of his has been. He’s been working on this project and on sourcing these beans for years. It’s been a long-term dream for Alejandro at Revival. We were very excited before the beans even got here. For this origin specifically, it was a special project before we even started. 

Is it too soon to talk about First Batch? 

Ron: We wanted to do something celebratory to introduce our new origins, and to reflect the start of a new partnership. Beginning with Río Samaria, we’re launching a collection called First Batch. It’ll include two Río Samaria bars, single-origin truffles made with Río chocolate, and three different varieties of batons with fillings inspired by the bar’s tasting notes.

How exciting to see this all come together. Congrats, Ron and Nate, and thanks for sharing the story behind our new Río Samaria bar.