How it's processed

First of all, the cacao pods are harvested from the trees and cracked open. The beans are then taken out and fermented. The level of fermentation affects the flavour; we do a low fermentation of about 45 degrees C, as otherwise the temperatures can get quite high, which affects the structure of the nutrients. The main thing that Loving Earth does differently to other chocolate makers is that we don't roast the raw cacao beans before we process them. The standard procedure in the chocolate industry is to roast the raw cacao, which helps bring out the flavour. It removes a lot of the microbiological contamination they might contain, but it also removes some of the valuable antioxidants contained within. What we do instead is wash them with a citric-based organic disinfectant. Afterwards, they're dried in large commercial dehydrators, at controlled temperatures, before being winnowed into nibs, which basically means taking the skin off them. Then we grind them into liquor, and finally we press them into powder and butter.

Basically, we get five products from this process. We get raw cacao beans, and because we've disinfected and washed them you can eat them - raw! We get raw cacao nibs, which are the beans without the skin. We get raw cacao liquor, which is the nibs ground into a paste. Then when we take the the liquor and put it into a very high-pressure press, which presses all the fat and butter out of it. So the end product is the raw cacao butter and then this hard cake that's milled into raw cacao powder. 1kg of liquor is about 50% fat, so when you press the liquor you get about 40% cacao butter and 60% powder. The powder retains about 10% fat content after pressing, and all the antioxidants plus a lot of the nutrients are concentrated in that powder.

We buy and import these five products, which we use to make our raw chocolate from scratch. When indigenous communities such as our friends in Peru manage to add as much value as possible at the point of origin, not only do we support agricultural industry, but also the development of that community. We get the five basic materials we need to make our chocolate, and they earn more, allowing them to further develop infrastructure to process their cacao.

How it's packaged

Every Loving Earth chocolate bar comes to you in a plant-based inner wrapper to maximise freshness and extend shelf life. These wrappers are not made of plastic, so please recycle them!

The boxes which contain our wrapped chocolate bars are made from 80% recycled post-consumer cardboard and are printed with vegetable inks.