Bean-to-bar chocolate company keeps ingredients local

It’s a flavor unique to Hawaii and a process dedicated to sustainability.

Madre Chocolate connects chocolate lovers to the origin of chocolate and incorporates locally grown, vegan ingredients. Owners Nat Bletter and David Elliott started Oahu’s first bean-to-bar chocolate company about five years ago with a vision to recognize and work with the cacao-growing communities in Hawaii and across the globe.

"We have the best chocolate on the island, for sure," said Carley Miller, chocolatier and manager of Madre’s Kailua location. "We really get down to the roots of chocolate and we really like to share what we do."

Madre uses many ingredients from Hawaii, such as local ginger, passionfruit, cacao and toasted coconut. Its main sources of cacao are farms in Hawi and Kona on Hawaii island and in Waiahole and the North Shore on Oahu.

"We’re really lucky in Hawaii to have the farm just 20 or 30 minutes up the road and have such good relationships with the farmers, as opposed to people who don’t ever get to see what their beans taste like in a chocolate bar," Miller said.

"Madre" is the spanish word for "mother," and was chosen to express how the owners were inspired by the motherland of chocolate in Central America and Southern Mexico, where chocolate was discovered about 4,000 years ago. Bletter and Elliott honor the motherland by using traditional ingredients and recipes developed hundreds of years ago. "Madre" is also a reference to mother Earth and the aspect of sustainability that is incorporated into their chocolate-making.

Madre Chocolate was birthed out of a dream Bletter had for many years to create traditional-ingredient chocolate, and a push from Elliott, who lived and worked in cacao-growing regions. Bletter’s interest in chocolate began as he was studying medicinal plants in Peru, Guatemala and Mali, all places that use or grow cacao. When a Mayan archaeologist and friend asked him to write a book chapter about traditional uses of cacao, Bletter’s interest in cacao grew.

"It was a way to combine my interests of food and plants together in celebrating the traditional Mesoamericans and their predecessors," Bletter said.

Bletter started making chocolate in his home kitchen with cacao beans from a local health food store, a coffee grinder and a food processor. He began selling them to friends and at holiday fairs, making hundreds of bars a week while finishing his thesis for graduate school.

His business partner, Elliott, lived in Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico, which are all cacao-growing regions. When Elliott and his wife visited Mexico, Bletter would ask them to get new ingredients from unknown places. After numerous wild goose chases for Bletter, Elliott suggested they start a chocolate company together, and Madre was born.

"It’s really great here because we can close the loop and give chocolate back to the farmer within a month or two of getting cacao from them," Bletter said. "Whereas normally cacao is grown in the tropics and they send the cacao thousands of miles and the cacao grower never ever tastes the chocolate from that."

Last year, cacao farmers on the Ivory Coast finally tasted the chocolate they’d been growing, many of them for the first time.

"Everyone was talking about it, ‘Oh it’s this amazing thing they finally got to taste the chocolate made from their beans and they were so surprised and proud,’ " Bletter said. "But that happens every day in Hawaii because we’re so close to the farmers … and that’s how we’ve gotten cacao in this great state in only a few short years to where it’s winning international awards."

According to Bletter, Madre has won about 18 Hawaiian, U.S. and international chocolate awards in the past three years. Elliott focuses on perfecting the dark chocolate base, while Bletter is known as the "flavormeister."

"I like to really connect the ingredients and the story of the chocolate to where it comes from," Bletter said. "With the Hawaiian cacao, I incorporate a lot of the great Hawaiian fruits and spices like the lilikoi or the coconut and ginger."

In the past year, cacao from Maunawili was granted heirloom designation by the Fine Chocolate Industry Association, which is the first time that cacao outside of Latin America has received that designation. Criollo cacao from Healani Orchards in Hawi put Hawaiian chocolate on the map after winning an international chocolate award in 2014.

"People are starting to realize that cacao is like wine, having all these different flavors even if you do the same process and the same recipe, just based on where it’s grown," Bletter said. "We can take the same variety of cacao and grow it in Hamakua and it’ll taste like pineapple and black pepper, and we grow it in Kona and it tastes like gooseberries and Brazil nuts, and we grow it in Kahuku and it tastes like marzipan, and we grow it in Waiahole and it tastes like Oreos. It’s just totally different flavors that all come from the land and the rain and the fertilizer where it’s grown specifically."

Chocolate-making classes at Madre have progressively become more popular, from the hour-long "make your own chocolate bar" class, to the three-hour "bean to bar chocolate-making" class, to various alcohol and chocolate pairing classes, and an Oahu cacao farm and chocolate factory tour.

"I really love the little tiny things that make a big difference in chocolate, like the bean origin and the fermenting and if the roast is off it’ll make the chocolate off or if the grinder gets weird that’ll make the final bar weird," Miller said. "So it’s like the little minor details that affect the bigger picture."

Bletter and Elliott have plans to open a cafe in Chinatown in a few months where they can serve pastries, drinks and savory foods that incorporate cacao.

Like the concept of nose-to-tail eating, which suggests eating every part of an animal, Madre promotes "root-to-fruit eating." In the cafe, customers would be able to sit under the cacao tree from which their chocolate was made and see the whole process.

"It’s unique that you can see the fresh cacao pods and visit a farm where they come from," Bletter said. "You can’t do that anywhere else in the U.S. and maybe in only about three or four places in the world can you see the entire, not only bean-to-bar process, but tree-to-bar process."