Silk Grass Farms + Valrhona: Partners in Impact Producing the World’s Greatest Chocolate
A few years ago, the world’s premier French chocolatier, Valrhona, discovered a rare resource nestled in the rainforest near the Xibun River in southern Belize — Silk Grass Farms. At the Xibun River facility, our farmers grow exquisite cacao trees shaded by towering hardwoods like Pito and Salmwood. And on a breezy hillside nearby, the growers take advantage of ideal conditions for fermenting the cocoa beans and pulp in the open air, then drying them in the powerful Belizean sunshine. The result is one of the world’s finest dark chocolates, which Valrhona markets to chefs and premium patisseries under its Tulakalum and Xibun brands.
Valrhona’s Xibun label, made from Silk Grass Farms cacao, was co-developed with the famous Pierre Herme patisseries.
Beyond the lucky convergence of the farm’s ideal setting, Valrhona also discovered in Silk Grass Farms a unique ally in its mission to protect the people and the forests that produce its raw materials. We have woven the same mission into our DNA. Our farms are managed to the highest standards of sustainability and environmental protection. Our employees all earn a living wage and all the company’s profits are dedicated to supporting the 24,500-acre Silk Grass Wildlife Preserve.
“We were obviously thrilled to find a supplier of such high-quality cocoa,” says Valrhona Cocoa Sourcer Stephane Sabourin. “But it’s even more unusual, and more valuable, to find a partner as deeply committed to the environment and to its people as Valrhona is. Silk Grass Farms is that kind of partner.”
Today, Valrhona buys all of the Silk Grass Farms cocoa beans with current targets of 100 metric tons per year. To fulfill our end of the partnership, we are currently working to increase Cacao production on lands where coconuts and oranges were formerly grown.
Sabourin travels the world to find the best cocoa produced by the most conscientious farmers. That presents a big challenge. Cacao is grown in some of the most remote and impoverished parts of the world, places like Ivory Coast, Ghana, Ecuador and Cameroon. He’s frequently in Jamaica and Grenada, as well. The farms are hard to get to, and most of the farming has historically been run by exploitative multinational agribusinesses, without regard for the wellbeing of the local farmers or the natural environment. When Sabourin finds conscientious producers, Valrhona pays premium prices to secure those supplies.
Taste-testing at the Valrhona office in France.
“We were obviously thrilled to discover Silk Grass Farms and to make them a partner,” he says. “There are very few producers anywhere in the world whose mission matches Valrhona’s to this degree.”
“Valrhona is exactly the kind of customer and partner we most want to find,” says Henry Canton, Silk Grass Farms Co-founder and Executive Director. “Our relationship has become an active collaboration where we both are contributing, I think, to the other’s prosperity and its social and environmental impact.”