Nova linha de chocolates finos da Na’Kau lança barra com Café Apuí Agroflorestal
Resulting from a partnership between Idesam and Na’Kau, the product aims to value small scale family farming.
By Henrique Saunier
Translated by Fernanda Barbosa and Felipe Sá
Chocolate and coffee lovers will be able to taste the best of both worlds with the launch of Na’Kau 63% Chocolate made with Apuí Agroforestry Coffee, the first out of a series of chocolates with Amazon ingredients. Idesam is one of the articulators of this partnership which, beyond the quality of the final product, seeks to value family farming.
Being the third biggest chocolate market in the world, Brazil has been registering significant rise in the production of fine chocolates, which are the ones with at least 40% of cacao. This is encouraging companies to increasingly invest in differentiated products that offer consumers a taste of the product and also its social context.
In addition to the partnering with Idesam for the Apuí Agroforestry Coffee, Na’Kau is also partnering with other entities for additional Amazon products, such as the Baniwa Pepper from Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA, in Portuguese) and the Amazon Chestnut from Vitória Amazônica Foundation (FVA, in Portuguese).
The initial proposal was to connect Na’Kau with other products and brands with an Amazon identity and socioenvironmental responsibility, such as ours. This is a project in which we’ve been investing for a while now, and it has just become a reality with the Apuí Coffee, the Baniwa Pepper and Amazon Chestnut.
The launch took place in the beginning of June, in São Paulo, at Naturaltech, one of the largest and most traditional fairs of organic products and agroecology in Latin America. Produced with lowland wild native cacao, the raw material comes from suppliers located along the Madeira River.
“We always pay three times more to the (cacao) producer in comparison to regular local market and middlemen prices. We always conduct this work of capacity building, training, assistance and, in some cases, financing the production improvement, as well as the introduction of sustainable practices in order to achieve the organic certification”, highlights Arthur Coimbra, owner of Na’Kau.
To Coimbra, the common interest of valuing the Amazon product was essential to establish the partnership with Idesam. Ramom Moratom, Idesam’s agroecology coordinator, agrees with the similarities between the proposals, and believes that it is important to encourage initiatives that help recover the forest.
“They also work with family producers and seek to give their chocolate an Amazon identity, just like the Apuí Coffee. The proposal is to value the best of what the Amazon has to offer, as well as its family based producers”, completes Morato.
The cacao content of Na’Kau chocolates start with 54% and ends at 81%, the strongest one. They can be found online or in restaurants, coffee shops and warehouses scattered across Manaus.
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