Long before chocolate was a candy bar, cacao was a drink: prized, shared, offered to the gods and traded like money. Its story stretches back more than five thousand years.
Where cacao began
The cacao tree is native to the upper Amazon basin. The oldest evidence of people using it comes from Santa Ana–La Florida in southern Ecuador, where archaeologists found traces of cacao in pottery more than 5,000 years old. From there, cacao traveled north, and by around 3,900 years ago it was being prepared in Mesoamerica, the region stretching from Mexico through Central America.
The Olmec, Maya and Aztecs
In Mesoamerica, cacao became woven into daily life, trade and ritual.
- The Olmec of the Gulf Coast of Mexico are among the earliest known cacao drinkers.
- The Maya drank cacao at weddings and feasts, buried it with the dead, and painted it on ceramics. Maya vessels with cacao residue and hieroglyphs naming the drink have been found across the region. Cacao was usually whipped into a froth by pouring it from one vessel to another, and flavored with chili, flowers or maize.
- The Aztecs, who could not grow cacao in their highland capital, received it as tribute and valued it so highly that cacao beans were used as currency. Their drink, often served cold and spiced, was reserved largely for nobles, warriors and priests.
From sacred drink to sweet treat
Spanish colonizers brought cacao to Europe in the 1500s, where sugar was added and it became a fashionable drink of the courts. In the 1800s, industrial inventions changed it completely: a press that separated cacao butter from the solids led to cocoa powder and, eventually, the solid chocolate bar. Cacao became cheap and sweet, and the whole, unsweetened drink largely disappeared from everyday life outside its homelands.
Cacao in Costa Rica
Here in Costa Rica, cacao never stopped being sacred. For Indigenous communities of the Talamanca region, such as the Bribri, cacao is a spiritual plant, part of origin stories and still prepared and shared in ceremony. Costa Rica also had a long history as a cacao-growing country, until a fungal disease called monilia devastated many plantations in the late 1970s and farmers turned to other crops. In recent decades, small farmers have been bringing heirloom cacao back.
Many of the small farms we work with are Indigenous-owned, and cacao there is still treated as medicine for the spirit, not just a crop. Buying from them directly is part of keeping that tradition alive.
The ceremonial cacao revival
Over the last two decades, interest in whole, unsweetened cacao has grown around the world, along with practices like cacao ceremonies, meditation and breathwork. We think the respectful way to take part is to learn where cacao comes from, credit the cultures that kept it sacred, and make sure the people who grow it are paid fairly for doing it well.