When we think of chocolate, why do we never think of Honduras?

In every photograph of my childhood birthdays, I’m wearing a different dress. But the cake is always chocolate.

Growing up in the west, I was sold the story that the world’s best chocolate is made in the Swiss Alps or behind the glass of a Parisian bakery. It never crossed my mind that it could come from the same country my parents packed up and left in the ‘80s. So that’s what brings me here to Honduras, curious about the country’s role in chocolate’s story. 

My nose finds the Roatan Chocolate Factory before my eyes do. Just as I’m about to stop and ask for directions, the warm, toasty wisps of cacao lead me to its bright pink beams and yellow walls. It’s the kind of place that would make Willy Wonka smile.

Roatán is the largest of the three Bay Islands that sit in the Caribbean, a few miles off the coast of mainland Honduras. The island is only about 47 miles (77 kilometers) long and is ringed by the second largest coral reef in the world. Walking the West End strip, women call out asking to braid your hair, and men approach offering freshly picked mangos. And within this humid paradise, the scent of chocolate strangely fits right in.

In fact, it was in 1502, on these same shores, that European colonialists encountered cacao for the first time. Christopher Columbus intercepted a Mayan trading canoe off the Honduran coast, its cargo loaded with goods. Columbus’s son later wrote of the fuss the local people made over the unfamiliar beans, stooping quickly to rescue any that dropped, “as if an eye had fallen from their heads.” 

The Spanish thought they were almonds and sailed on. 

Stepping inside the factory, I’m immediately surrounded by dozens of chocolate bars. On the second floor, a wall of glass encloses a small air-conditioned room where women are moving with haste, pouring dark, glossy chocolate into molds. I press my face to the glass to watch.

The women are focused, working with the urgency of people who understand that chocolate is a dance with temperature. The majority of the workforce here is female. It’s women who sort the beans, who grind them, who pour and wrap and seal them. The industry runs on their hands, and it has been this way for longer than chocolate has been a bar.

Honduras has been officially recognized at the Cacao of Excellence Awards—the world’s most prestigious cacao competition—most notably in 2015 when it was named the best cacao in Central America and the Caribbean.

Dayana Banegas, one of the factory managers, has worked here for six years, often leading chocolate making classes for visitors willing to learn. “I love being part of this work and seeing how we connect with the people from all over the world who love chocolate,” she tells me. “Finding a job here has made me happy, I consider it a blessing. And it’s lovely to see the emotion on people’s faces when they try it.” 

As I watch the women work, I think about the Maya who once drank cacao. It was not chocolate as we know it, but a thick ceremonial drink made for royalty. That drink became a bar. The kings became tourists. But the same hands are still here, pouring.

In a different corner of the chocolate factory, I meet Daniel, a self-taught chocolate maker who has dedicated years of trial and error on his quest to perfect the artisanal bar. He passes around roasted cacao beans from La Mosquitia, a vast roadless jungle in northeastern Honduras—18,000 square miles (47,000 square kilometers) of rainforest denser than the Amazon—and watches our faces as we bite into them.

The bean is gritty, airy, coffee-like. He then holds up two bags of cocoa powder (raw cacao beans after they have been roasted and processed). One is light brown, the other nearly black. “The dark one has been processed to hide what the bean has lost,” he says. 

Up until now, I didn’t know chocolate could lose something.

When European traders moved cacao to West Africa in the 1700s to cultivate the cash crop somewhere cheaper and closer (West Africa now produces some 70 to 80 percent of the world’s cocoa production), they took the bean out of its jungle, far from the river water and fruit trees that had always grown beside it. “When sommeliers talk about wine, they say ‘a hint of cedar, a scent of lavender.’ It’s the same with cacao,” says Daniel. “Change the environment, and the flavor becomes flat.”

“In the jungle,” he continues, “the cacao trees are getting different nutrients and minerals from the soil, and from the river flowing down the mountain. The fruit and floral trees are what give the cacao its depth and flavor.”

Honduras has been officially recognized at the Cacao of Excellence Awards— the world’s most prestigious cacao competition—most notably in 2015 when it was named the best cacao in Central America and the Caribbean. And when you take your first bite of a Honduran single-origin bar, you’ll understand the hype. The same soil that feeds the banana and mango trees all unravels as it melts on your tongue. It’s as if you are tasting the land itself.

“Any chocolate that comes from cacao grown in La Mosquitia is jaguar-friendly chocolate,” Dani tells me. “Because our chocolate depends on the shade of the mahogany tree.”

Mahogany trees tower over the cacao, giving it the shade it needs to survive. These tees also happen to be home to the jaguar. Because cacao grows beneath them, local tree cutters know to leave the mahogany standing. You don’t clear a tree when someone’s livelihood depends on what grows under it. The tree that shades the bean shelters the jaguar. Chocolate is a food that gives—to the land, to the animals, to the families who depend on it.

In ancient Mayan days, cacao was also medicine, currency, and ritual. They painted it onto their ceramics, wrote about it in their hieroglyphics, and offered it to their gods. It was here that the first stories of chocolate were ever recorded. But when the Europeans got hold of the cacao bean, the narrative shifted, and chocolate’s origins became overshadowed.

But Allen González never forgot.

On a phone call with Allen, he tells me that he spent years working in the export industry, watching Honduras’ best beans board ships headed for Europe. But in 2019, he stopped watching and started asking a different question: What if Honduras had its own great chocolate brand? 

That’s what motivated him to start Avenida Cacao, a popular Honduran chocolate brand with five stores and distribution in supermarkets across the country. Every bar is made from Mayan Red—a single-origin variety grown in the coastal region of Tela Atlantida, in northern Honduras.

You can move the bean, you can temper it, and add to it, but you cannot change where it comes from.

“When someone opens an Avenida Cacao bar,” he tells me, “I want them to feel that they’re eating a piece of Honduras. The packaging, the ingredients, everyone involved—it’s all Honduran.”

Seven years ago, there were only nine chocolate brands in Honduras. Now there are 20. Allen is working with members of Congress on a bill to eliminate the 15 percent sales tax on Honduran chocolate, so that local makers can finally compete on their own shelves.

“We’re creating a really healthy market inside the country,” he says. “We invest in farms, in people, in branding. We’re trying to make people conscious of using good materials, supporting farmers, supporting the people who work for us.” He pauses. “What’s made in Honduras is made well.”

I’m starting to realize that maybe my love for this food runs deeper than I knew. My parents were born in Honduras, and their parents before them, and I grew up eating chocolate cake at every birthday, in every dress, never realizing how much my heritage had to do with the food so many love.

Somewhere over the Caribbean on my flight home, I open an Avenida Cacao bar. It’s 70 percent dark chocolate and crowned with shredded coconut. Hints of tropical fruits move across the palate before a subtle bitterness hits the back of the throat. 

This bar of chocolate is a piece of my land, as Allen would say. Cacao, grown under the shade of mahogany trees in a jungle the Spanish never managed to conquer, poured by women’s hands on an island that smells like chocolate and salt.

You can move the bean, you can temper it, and add to it, but you cannot change where it comes from. “This is chocolate’s home,” says Daniel. “People relate chocolate to the French or the Swiss. But they don’t know that Mesoamerica, and the Mayan people who have consumed it for centuries, is where chocolate all began.”

Now, I finally understand.

Find out more about Roatan Chocolate Factory and Avenida Cacao.

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