When not guiding guests aboard INTEGRITY, INCA naturalist Pati Stucki tends to her organic farm in the Santa Cruz highlands, where she grows cocoa for her recently-launched Dark Shark Chocolates. We sat down with Pati and asked her about producing chocolate in Galapagos.

Pati’s cacao farm in the Santa Cruz highlands

What made you decide to take on cocoa farming?

Everybody around was growing coffee but nobody dedicated their plantations to cocoa. So I took the challenge and started to get cocoa pods. We are not allowed to bring in new plants, so I had to look for cocoa trees growing on the island already.

The flowers of the cacao tree are cauliferous, meaning they grow directly from the trunk

What are the seasons for the crop?

We have the warm and wet season between January and May and the cold and dry season between June and December. The harvesting season starts about in September and ends in January. In the other months we prune the plants. The production of compost and Biol (liquid natural fermented fertilizer that is applied on the leaves) is a constant process. I do not apply any chemicals to the plants.

The flowers eventually give way to seed pods.

From planting, to harvest, to processing, what is the amount of time involved?

It takes quite a few years to get there: the plants take five years before they start to produce but they need a lot of care (much more than coffee). Then you ferment the beans. I designed a chamber for that very important process. Lastly, you dry the beans. This last step is particularly challenging considering in the cold season. We have a constant mist in the highlands of Santa Cruz and the sun rarely shines. I had to build a dryer for that purpose. Once the beans are dry, the chocolate making can begin: roasting, peeling, refining, and tempering are processes required to obtain the finished product.

Harvesting the seeds from the pods.

How does this compare to the chocolate your grew up with?

It's a whole different story: I grew up (half a kilometer away from a chocolate factory) with chocolate sweets and nice milk chocolate. The content of cacao is rather low in those products but as a child I loved them (I still do). And what I’m going for now is rather dark chocolate: basically cocoa with a certain amount of sugar - nothing else - pure and much healthier.

What are the challenges to farming on Santa Cruz?

One of the biggest challenges is to get things you need and of course the high costs that living on an island implies. That includes labor and machines and other items for the running of the plantation and also the processing. Another factor that worries me is that a pest (disease or a parasite) that affects the plants could be brought by accident to the island. Hopefully that will not happen.

How does this cocoa differs from what is grown on the mainland?

The difference is that the cocoa grows in volcanic soil. I don’t really know how the volcanic soil affects the flavor, but I do know that it definitely has a positive affect on the flavor of my chocolate. Aspects that definitely do influence the flavor are how you treat the plants and fruits and how you process the beans. Fermenting is very important. I hope, in the near future, to have all the machines here on the island so I can produce bean to bar chocolate in the place where the plants grow.

Dark Shark and collaboration with To’ak

In addition to Pati’s own line of chocolates named Dark Shark, she has recently partnered with Ecuador’s premier chocolate producer To’ak to supply beans for their first single-origin chocolates from Galapagos. Pati is proud to be the supplier of 90% of those beans.

Pati’s Galapagos beans are now offered by premium Ecuadorian chocolate producer To’ak