We are Kallari:
We are Kallari, a coalition of 850 indigenous farming families located in the Upper Napo River region, surrounding Tena, Ecuador. Hundreds of ethical retailers across the USA have carried our bean to bar chocolate since 2006. All the wholesale profits stay in our Kichwa cooperative villages in Ecuador, so we can provide for our family needs and maintain our rainforests.
We are committed to make the freshest and best tasting chocolate in the world, using only heirloom cacao varietals such as: Cacao Nacional de Arriba, Criollo, and Trinitario for our chocolate. These uncommon cultivars bear less than half as much per acre, but are more flavorful and aromatic, with much less astringency than other hybridized cacao.
We take fresh cacao beans and process chocolate in Ecuador, only a few hours from our farms. We can guarantee flavor freshness that is missing in cacao processed in Europe or North America, thousands of miles from the source.
We produce our cacao in a 'chakra' which is our organic ancient Kichwa farming technique that includes scores of plant species: hardwoods, fruits trees, palms, edible plants, and medicinal plants. The composition of the chakra insures rich fertile soil that sustains our nutritional needs, harbors megadiversity, and nourishes the chocolate consumers without exploiting natural resources or cacao farmers.
Chipped Chocolate:
We want to produce chocolate chunks in one-gram square with half the sugar content of standard chips. Chefs, home-bakers, chocoholics and loving parents alike will be able to create memorable desserts with our 70% Cacao, 75% Cacao and 85% Cacao chipped chocolate.
Kallari Chipped Chocolate Ingredients:
Organic cacao beans, organic cane sugar, organic cacao butter, organic whole vanilla bean.
Our chipped chocolate will be soy free, dairy free, gluten-free, and Kosher.
Our Mission:
We need your help to produce chipped chocolate that supports both you the consumer and help us the cacao farmers. The money that we need to manufacture the first batch of chipped chocolate will be used for ingredients, packing materials, sealing equipment, import logistics and mailing the rewards to your home. We seek people who are tired of chocolate-flavored-sugar, and are willing to pay a fair price for chocolate with a touch of sugar. With your sponsorship, we can pass on to our children the Kichwa heritage of complex agriculture systems and heirloom cacao cultivars that our ancestors designed, which combine to create the perfect chocolate experience.
**Please let us know if you would prefer that your name not to be mentioned on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter while the Kickstarter campaign runs.**
Risks and challenges
We will use an artisanal, hand-made chocolate chipper with a 1 hp electric motor, to chip our 70 gram organic chocolate bars into 1 gram rectangular chips with uniform size and weight. We have prepared the artwork for our packaging material, but need your help to make the first batch.
Our biggest challenge is to find consumers that are willing to pay more for an ethical and healthy chocolate. The ingredients for Kallari chipped chocolate cost three times the amount as raw material for standard chocolate chips, due to the increased amount of cacao and superb quality organic cocoa beans sourced directly from the Kallari cooperative. In the future, we predict that our price point in stores will be double the cost of standard morsels, but we are willing to take a risk with Kickstarter to see if the market is big enough to support our start-up costs for this new product.
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Funding period
- (30 days)