In the hills of central Bahia, there is a piece of land that used to be just pasture. In 2008, Fred and his daughter looked at that tired ground and decided to plant something different: cacao trees, grown the slow way, organically.
That decision became what the farm is today, and it’s still a family affair, carried forward by his son, Rodrigo, and the people who raised him, supported by the communities around.
This is the farm our cacao from Mother Bahia comes from. Not a supplier we found on a list, but a family we know, working a land they’ve cared for with their own hands for over fifteen years.
For them, the choice to grow organically was never about a label. It was about the soil, the water, the trees around the cacao, the people who live alongside it.
That care earned the farm certification from Povos da Mata, a network built around exactly this kind of farming
Each month, the farm produces around 160kg of chocolate, most of it sold close to home, in small shops and empóriums across Bahia. Over a year, that’s roughly 2 tonnes of cacao, turned into simple 100% bars and, more recently, chocolate paired with cashew butter.
The process is unhurried, and it shows. A selective harvest, choosing only the ripest pods.
Careful fermentation. Washing. Days of drying on raised platforms, the beans turned by hand again and again. Then a gentle roast, a long grind through old stone rollers, and hand tempering and moulding, until what started as a raw seed becomes cacao butter – becomes chocolate and cacao bars.
In 2023, the farm joined the Bean to Bar community, a network of small producers who believe in the same thing we do: real food, made without shortcuts.
As Rodrigo, the captain of this ship says, “being part of that community strengthens something bigger than any one farm. a whole way of working that puts quality, land, and people first.”
This is where Mother Bahia begins. From Tree to bar, all on one farm.