Cacao · Live Online Workshop · First Edition
Cacao Beyond
the Label
Returning to the Seed
What does a responsible relationship with cacao ask of us?
A live workshop on the cacao seed, responsible sourcing, the claims we inherit, and the questions they ask us to investigate.
Saturday, December 12, 2026
11:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m. ET & Colombia · Live on Zoom · Held in English
Early registration: USD 75 through November 22
Reserve your place
The words we inherit
Some words carry more authority than information.
Many of us who work with cacao inherit a vocabulary before we learn how to examine it.
These words can suggest qualities a label does not establish, turn a hypothesis into fact, or make a market category sound like an inherent property of cacao. Others have simply been repeated so often that they now sound like facts.
For years, I repeated some of these claims myself. This workshop grows from the questions that eventually made that impossible.
Those claims shape real decisions: what gets planted, what is preserved, what the market rewards, what those of us who share cacao learn to trust, and what ultimately reaches the cup.
Responsible sourcing
That is why sourcing matters.
To source cacao is to decide which seeds enter our hands, our practice, and the spaces we share with others.
Choosing responsibly asks us to look past the language on a package and investigate where the seed came from, how it was grown and handled, whose work made it possible, and what happened to it along the way.
What we have seen, we cannot unsee. What we know, we cannot unknow. Knowledge brings responsibility.
So we return to the beginning: the seed.
Hello, World!