What Does Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Actually Mean?

Bean-to-bar chocolate means one maker handles every step, from whole cacao beans to the finished bar.

Most chocolate is made by large manufacturers, and many chocolatiers start by melting down that ready-made chocolate. A bean-to-bar maker starts with the raw bean instead. At organicfair, we sort, roast, crack, winnow, stone-grind, temper, mould and wrap every batch by hand on our farm in Cobble Hill, BC.

Watch every step, from cacao bean to chocolate bar, in 60 seconds.

The 10 steps from cacao bean to chocolate bar

1. 1
   Sourcing and sorting. Our cacao comes from Nicaragua. Every batch starts with sorting the beans by hand.
2. 2
   Roasting. The beans are roasted over open flame. Roasting is where the chocolate flavour really begins.
3. 3
   Cooling and cracking. Once the beans cool, we crack them into pieces.
4. 4
   Winnowing. The papery shells are blown away, leaving the cacao nibs.
5. 5
   Stone grinding. The nibs go into a stone grinder, where they slowly turn from a crunchy nib into liquid chocolate.
6. 6
   Sugar and refining. We add sugar and a little cocoa butter and keep refining until the chocolate is smooth and creamy.
7. 7
   Tempering. We melt the chocolate, cool it, then gently rewarm it. This sets the cocoa butter into beta 5 crystals, which give chocolate its shine and snap.

   45°C

   Melt

   28°C

   Cool

   31°C

   Rewarm
8. 8
   Inclusions and moulding. For our Canadiana 75% dark chocolate bar, we add apple, maple and a touch of smoked salt before the chocolate goes into the moulds.
9. 9
   Unmoulding and wrapping. Once set, the bars come out of the moulds and are wrapped by hand.
10. 10
    The snap. A well-tempered bar breaks with a clean, sharp snap.

Bean-to-bar vs. regular chocolate

When a maker controls every step, they control the flavour.

Roasting, grinding time and tempering all change how a bar tastes and feels. Small-batch bean-to-bar chocolate lets you taste where the cacao was grown and how it was made, instead of a flavour designed to be the same everywhere.

Frequently asked questions