Chocolates Na’kau, from Manaus, produces its bean to bar chocolate with native cacao from the Amazon, the oldest and wildest one in the world

In March, he will make an expedition to Manicoré, on the Madeira River, with several experts, to create specific post-harvest protocols for the region’s cocoa

Biologist, Artur Bicelli Coimbra, while studying for his master’s degree in sustainability from the Federal University of Amazonia, UFAM, had plans to create a company to work with Amazonian food in general. He went so far as to create a formulation for producing acai wine and to create the brand, Na Floresta, Produtos Amazônicos.

But halfway there was a rock. Or rather a cocoa. And, before diversifying his line, he first bet on the fruit. He began researching and planning, and in January 2017, he launched the Na’kau, from bean to bar chocolates, made exclusively with native cacao from several regions of the Amazon, the oldest and wildest in the world.

Nowadays, Na’kau is the first and only chocolate factory in the Amazon, which processes chocolate from cocoa beans using natural resources. “We created Na’kau to value the Amazonian woman and man, while paying a fair price for the value of the products. We are tired of seeing disregard for the forest, disrespect for the people of the Amazon and the amount of conventional and poisoned products we consume today,” he emphasizes.

“Our first year was very difficult, the second one too, but now, with a production of around 400 kg of chocolate per month, we were able to pay, thanks to the 140 reseller points spread across 16 Brazilian states and import into Japan , USA and Portugal of Na’kau chocolates,” says Artur.

For the biologist and entrepreneur, the great difficulty for the company to grow even more is the logistics. “As an Amazon company, most points of sale are outside the region, which means that we lose 15% to 25% of our profit margin in the transportation of chocolates that leave here by plane in special packaging,” he explains.

Na’kau currently has five employees and three partners. Arthur is the founding partner, uses an angel investor and Leandro de Oliveira, the first partner to become a partner as well.

Na’kau has two product lines: Origins and Sustainable Partnerships. Origens has bars of 54%, 63%, 72% and 81% of cacao, marketed in bars of 40 grams and packs of 1 kg destined to the BtoB market.

The Sustainable Partnerships line counts on 72% cacao combined with Baniwa pepper, a blend of peppers developed for millennia by Baniwa indigenous people. For them, Jiquitaia Baniwa pepper plays an important role in the rituals of passage into adult life, bringing protection against the invisible worlds.

Another product of the same line is the bar 72% of cocoa combined with cupuaçu, Amazonian fruit belonging to the same family of cacao. It also has the bar 63% cocoa combined with Apuí, conilon, agroforestry coffee, produced by family farmers in the south of Amazonas and, lastly, 63% cocoa with chestnut from Pará.

In search of the purest cocoa

To ensure the quality of cocoa from the start, the company invested in travel in the region to find good suppliers. The brand was born with four of them and today, there are already eight planting cacao on the banks of the rivers.

“We have worked with the same producers for about five years, with education, awareness, training, management etc. This year, I am going to the Upper Amazon, the boundary region with Colombia, after a different cocoa. I wish to see and understand what cocoa is, discovering its flavor and tasting it,” explains the biologist.

Artur believes that in the Brazilian Amazon there should be some incidence of the Venezuelan Creole cacao, known as Porcelain. And it is justifiable: by the morphology of the fruit, which is white inside, it must occur here also, since we are in the cradle of cacao. My quest is initially finding the crop stains on the banks of the rivers, and then studying the path it took to get there,” he says.

New Expedition

Together with his distributor in Japan, Ama-Ama, Lovamos Amazon, www.ama-ama.jp,

along with the Japanese NGO, Curumim, www.curumim-jp.org, Artur, a professor at UFLA – MG, specializing in the fermentation of coffees and cacao, and 10 other professionals, will be participating in an expedition to Manicoré, at the Madeira River.

With the departure of Manaus scheduled for March 11, the group will sail in a straight line for about 900 km, making a pilot trip to identify the quality of cocoa and study the best way of processing it, specific to the region. “In general, post-harvesting the fruit needs to be adapted to the Amazon, taking into account the humidity, temperature and variety of the cocoa.

The trip is expected to last for a week, and will result in the creation of a detailed report and how these contacts can evolve, in a second moment, to identify new suppliers,” says Arthur.

“Na’kau has already invested in this kind of exploratory trip, but now we are adding new players. Together with our international partners, we will create another company, under Na Floresta Alimentos Amazônicos, which will be responsible for reselling cocoa to chocolatiers, especially those in the bean to bar market that is exponentially growing in Brazil,” he says.

Where to find it

In Brazil, Na’kau chocolates can be found in Casa Santa Luzia, Alex Atala’s box, Mercadão de Pinheiros and Coffee Lab, which uses it to make coffee, chocolate and cheese harmonization, all in São Paulo. To access other spots, visit www.nakau.com.br

In the US, it is marketed by the Seattle distributor, CCC – Culinary, Culture, Connections e-commerce, at www.culinarycultureconnections.com.