“Does Jamaica produce cocoa?” I just stared, puzzled as a leading chocolate blogger asked me one of the most stupid questions EVER!
I was in Grenada aka the Spice Island for their annual Chocolate Festival, it was more of a pilgrimage for me, to visit the Grenada Chocolate Company, a small organic maker that sells its award winning bars across the globe.
The firm is run by a co-op of farmers in the Eastern Caribbean nation, it was the genesis behind me becoming a chocolate maker four years ago.
Back then I managed to get in contact with Mott Green, one of the founders, I told him I’d tried his bars, loved what they were doing in promoting their Caribbean chocolate abroad and told him how I wished there was a similar thing in Jamaica.
To say Mott was direct would be an understatement and he flat out told me it had been done before, by Highgate Chocolate, a brand that dominated not only the shelves of Jamaican supermarkets but became a best seller across the Caribbean.
He then dropped the bombshell that he had bought his machinery from the St Mary based factory when it closed, re-engineered them to run off solar and now they were totally off the grid making organic carbon neutral bars, that were transported via sailboat to Europe.
He inspired me to go out and make chocolate, after all Jamaica is one of the only twenty-three countries in the world where fine and flavour cocoa can be grown; these types are considered superior to the large quantities of cocoa grown in Africa that makes up 75% of the global market.
Your average bar isn’t really chocolate, not technically speaking, it’s a mix of fillers and fats that cut costs and use only a tiny percentage of cacao, such low amounts that in some European Countries they’re legally not allowed to call it chocolate if it’s been stretched with vegetable oil or the low quality beans that have been enhanced with artificial flavourings.
But our history with chocolate in Jamaica has always been with the real deal, the highest grade. Our cocoa was originally one of the first crops grown by the Spanish when they took this island as their own. The earliest varieties to reach our shore were from Mexico and Central America.
It was a relatively cheap crop to grow and needed only a few people to be profitable. When the English came along they reported back to the Royal Court about the large number of Cocoa Walks they discovered in what is now St Catherine.
They also quickly looked for investors to buy land and plant more, it was an easy sell as the start up costs were much lower than that of the other big crop of the age, sugar; the only downside was that the trees took up to five years to bear, but as one historian told me cocoa was the “Viagra of its day” classed as an aphrodisiac: this new product on the European market was drunk by the rich and famous as well as the royal.
Sir Hans Sloan, who later went on to collect much of what became the British Museum, was a Dr posted to the island during that time. He wrote about chocolate and many believe he invented the hot chocolate drink that we know today adding milk to improve the taste. However it was commonly drunk that way by the Spanish but his version was a success. When the recipe was later manufactured by Cadbury’s and turned into a milk chocolate bar, the rest became history.
However a disease struck in the late 17th century which changed the face of this island as a “blast” destroyed much of the island’s cocoa. The planter class looked for a new way to make money and sugar was the one that reaped the biggest rewards; the only downside was it was labour intensive and so started the transportation of the enslaved, the failure of one crop changed this island’s landscape and people forever.
Things went quiet for cocoa until after emancipation when the colonial authorities decided to bring in the best of the best beans from Trinidad.
Over the years, species of cocoa from central and south America cross bread to create a new strain, hardy and disease resistant with an excellent taste and produced a lot of beans. This new variety was called Trinitario.
They started small, planting a few seedlings in bamboo pots transported to Castleton in St Mary; the Botanical Gardens were the perfect testing site. The plants thrived in the cool hills and soon tens of thousands were planted across the island.
In 1876, at the World’s fair that was being held in the US to mark its centenary, Jamaica won an award for its chocolate. FG Laugier of 26 King St won global recognition for locally made Jamaican Chocolate something that One/One Cacao repeated last year winning two International Academy of Chocolate Awards.
The island was never a major producer; countries like Grenada, Trinidad, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru were way bigger but it was the introduction of the crop on another continent that changed everything.
The West African countries of Ivory Coast and Nigeria were ideally suited to produce cocoa and they were also closer to the main European markets of London and Amsterdam. They came to dominate global production and still do.
However when in the late 19th century reports surfaced of slave labour being used on plantations, some manufacturers like Rowntree’s of York and Cadburys bought their own estates in the Caribbean. These early attempts at vertical integration failed badly with Rowntree’s selling their properties in Portland at a loss but Cadburys stayed put until they sold the business to Charles Clarke who started Highgate.
Which is where I came in. I never had a chance to tell Mott Green in Grenada about my new enterprise, he sadly died in a tragic accident in his chocolate factory in 2013.
The work of pioneers like him is the only hope for a country like ours that grows some of the best cocoa in the world, an industry worth over 100 billion a year. It’s time Jamaica gets back to its cocoa roots to reap the awards it so richly deserves.
Nick Davis is founder of One/One Cacao, a small manufactory in the cocoa-growing parish of St Mary that sources beans locally and across the island. In 2017 One/One Cacao won silver and bronze medals at the Academy of Chocolate Awards.