Ora Cacao

I'm Jonas, founder of Ora Cacao. Under the guidance of a Zapotec elder in Oaxaca Mexico in 2012, I learned how to roast cacao beans on an open fire, hand peel them beneath a sacred mountain, and grind them to paste with stones. At the time, I had just completed my graduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and was in-between jobs at solar energy startups. I couldn't stop thinking about cacao. There was an energy to that cacao that I had never felt from chocolate before - an aliveness and a spirit. Needless to say, I became obsessed with making good chocolate at home and launched "Firefly Chocolate", a chocolate bar company, in 2014. As I reduced my own sugar intake due to health reasons, I wanted to make 100% cacao taste so good that no sweetener would even be necessary. I also became fascinated with drinking chocolate, because I loved the ritual of making a warm cup of cacao each morning. This led to the creation of our 100% ceremonial cacao discs. We brought a novel form factor and top notch quality to the nascent ceremonial cacao market, lending it credibility and staying power beyond a hippie phenomenon. As our business grew primarily online, we scaled our production capacity with our own custom factory purpose built to produce the highest quality ceremonial-grade cacao. We're now celebrating 10 years in business, with 5M cups of cacao served, and 400,000lbs of cacao beans purchased from regenerative farms in Belize, Colombia, Guatemala, Tanzania, and Uganda. We've come to define the gold-standard of cacao as regeneratively farmed, ethically sourced, 100% pure cacao with minimal processing, and sipped with gratitude. It's been an honor and privilege to steward the medicine of cacao to so many people around the globe. As we continue to grow, our intention is to stay close to the ground, listening to the guidance of cacao on how to serve this medicine in a good way.