Oro Chocolate & Coffee

A product, regenerative to the core

By 2018 I knew I needed a product business, something I could make in Nicaragua and export, that fit everything I believed. Chocolate does. Most of Nicaragua’s cacao comes from old heirloom varieties grown by small farmers. Grown in agroforestry, under shade trees, cacao gives a farm on the forest’s edge a reason to keep the forest, and every bar sold creates demand for that kind of farming. Even if you don’t care about regeneration, your purchase creates demand for this kind of agroforestry.

In 2019 we set up production in the kitchen of El Pacífico. I designed the molds and the packaging, and we started selling Oro at specialty shops and cafés across Nicaragua. At first I was a purist: two ingredients, cacao and sugar.

A field test and a Hershey’s bar

The reception was good enough that we rented a booth at Chocoa in Amsterdam. On 15 February 2020, at the airport in Liberia, Costa Rica, a security officer stopped us. What drugs do you have? Chocolate, we’re going to the chocolate fair. A field drug test said one of my bars was marijuana. I begged them to test a Hershey’s bar from the airport shop. It turned positive too. Then they ate it.

I was wrongfully arrested, and spent three and a half months under house arrest above a mechanic’s garage, doing yoga and breathwork and keeping the businesses alive by phone as the pandemic closed the borders, until a lab test cleared the chocolate. At the end of May, with the land borders closed, we chartered a plane: the only way back to Nicaragua. Then I went deeper into chocolate.

I became a scientist

Chocolate was growing during the pandemic, so I committed. I taught myself in earnest: I read Dandelion Chocolate’s book, watched Mānoa Chocolate’s Craft Chocolate TV, and ran batch after batch with Jesús, from our team in Nicaragua, testing them on friends and staff with surveys. It’s measurements and mixing and temperatures and pressure. Tempering is the most finicky step of all: temperature, humidity and the right crystal formation.

I switched our cacao to Ingemann, which ferments and dries cacao from more than 1,000 farming families. I chose two of Ingemann’s varieties: O’Payo, with notes of kiwi, pineapple and passion fruit, and Tuma, strong cocoa and nuts, the chocolate everyone knows. And the tests changed my mind about purity: people loved added cocoa butter, even when they didn’t know what it was. It’s more velvety, and it melts in your mouth, not in your hands. So we made it, and priced it so people in Nicaragua could afford it.

I taught Karina and Jesús to make chocolate, and they’re still with us. Our factory in San Juan del Sur roasts, winnows, grinds and conches, close to where the cacao grows, so more of the value stays in Nicaragua.

A shoe store into a chocolate shop

After more than a decade abroad I wanted to be closer to my family, and to show Nicaragua to the place I came from. Nature runs on pollinators that carry things from here to there. Now that I could export, I could be one.

In 2021 I bought a former shoe store at 1553 N Milwaukee Ave in Wicker Park and hired a contractor to build what I’d designed. I ended up as my own general contractor, not by choice, drawing on every build in Nicaragua. Two years of design and construction later, in November 2023, Oro Chocolate & Coffee opened.

It’s about 5,000 square feet, plus the basement. You walk in past the chocolate factory and the roastery, both behind glass and facing the street, because I wanted people to see exactly how it’s made. The melting, tempering and dosing line takes chocolate made in Nicaragua and turns it into bars, bonbons and drinking chocolate. An Ashe fluid-bed roaster does the coffee, and a gold-plated La Marzocco pulls the shots. MasayaCo made the counters, tables, shelves and floors from Nicaraguan teak, the seating is Nicaraguan bamboo, and an undulating teak sculpture hangs from the ceiling: an ode to water, a prayer to protect the water in the forest where the cacao and coffee grow. Past the bar there’s a long teak communal table, and the Nicaragua Room, with handmade rocking chairs.

Every step

The cacao is fermented and dried in Tipitapa by Ingemann, made into chocolate at our own factory in San Juan del Sur, and finished in Wicker Park. Ingemann’s agroforestry program has planted more than a million trees with cacao farmers, including on the edge of the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve. The coffee comes the same way, crop to cup, from Reserva Los Nogales, the farm in the mountains of Peñas Blancas where I’m a partner. When we opened, our signature drink, the Oro, was a golden milk mocha: milk chocolate with turmeric, ginger, cardamom, black pepper and cinnamon.

Since 2024 I’ve also been a partner and CFO at Ingemann. At the farm gate, Ingemann measures the brix, pH and temperature of every bag of wet cacao before it goes into its own wooden fermentation boxes, and every lot can be traced back to the farms it came from. That’s where a bar of Oro starts, weeks before anyone tastes it.