Maloko | About

The Maloko Story

You could say our artisan business is a bit out of the ordinary… we roast cocoa beans and make small batches of delicious dark chocolate right here in Auckland. Over the last few years the awareness of bean to bar chocolate has been gathering momentum in New Zealand, which we think is great. It was a very solitary landscape back in 2006 when we did our first cocoa roast in Grey Lynn. Local knowledge to create a small scale chocolate factory didn’t really exist, and equipment was scarce. An exciting part of our chocolate making journey has been piecing the puzzle together, researching, talking to bean to bar makers overseas and looking into documented historic techniques. Chocolate making is a refined mix of nature, chemistry, human judgement and like most things without an instruction manual – a fair amount of ingenuity.

It was an epic day when we roasted our first cocoa batch in 2006, and we have continued to make our own chocolate since. Picking up equipment – such as ancient 3-roll refiner from Scotland, as well as a larger scale stone grinder/refiner – as small-scale production grew around the world and equipment started to become available. Over time we have been gradually completing our small factory and plan to launch commercially soon.

Where it all began… The idea for making chocolate came from watching a documentary about the Caribbean and seeing cocoa pods for the first time. Inspired, we researched how chocolate is made, and discovered that there is far more to chocolate than the confection we were familiar with. It was the realisation too that the boutique chocolate companies we knew of in NZ, didn’t actually make their own chocolate. Like many people, we saw melted chocolate and just assumed – or to be honest hadn’t given it much thought before. What was even more interesting to us was that in most cases the overseas supplier and hence – the actual chocolate itself was the same. And really there’s nothing wrong with that as a base for chocolate creations, as the quality is high, but we were intrigued by the idea of uniqueness and simplicity, and highlighting the flavour of the beans. Much like the cocoa methods in the Caribbean.

The next step was to try these methods ourselves… and actually make some chocolate. Back then it was not easy to acquire cocoa beans. We knew that cocoa trees grew in a latitude belt around the Equator, and started searching in the local Pacific region. We were very fortunate make contact with the Va’ai family and their plantation on the pristine Northern Coast and hinterland of Savai’i, Samoa.

Our Plantation Partnership

Since meeting in 2006, we have built a long-standing partnership with Kolone Va’ai and his family. He manages the Va’ai Plantation, which has traditional Samoan vegetable crops and fruit trees (including gigantic breadfruit trees) on the lower areas, and cocoa growing higher up on the central slopes of Mt Elietoga, inland from Vaisala village. These cocoa trees were planted by Kolone’s Grandfather and have stood the test of seasonal extremes and cyclones over the years, all the while providing decades of cocoa harvests for ‘Koko Samoa’ (the local morning beverage.) We hope to contribute to the preservation of the cocoa plantation for future generations and add extra value to part of their harvest crop, by bringing it to New Zealand to make chocolate, at above Fair Trade rates.

Kolone is a Graduate of Victoria University in Wellington and works incredibly hard running the family business interests and plantation, and it’s an honour working with him on trade and development. Being in the thick of it at harvest time and working directly together to refine quality and process is a privilege. Projects include building fermentation boxes out of native timber, researching papers on the microbiology of cocoa fermentation, sourcing digital thermometers to monitor fermentation process, and lining the boxes with the leaves of the banana palm, as this contains the right bacteria to stimulate the fermentation process. Also having a longer fermentation time (6-7 days) to ensure full flavour development.

Many bean to bar chocolate makers never get to see or know the plantation their beans come from, or get to know the grower. Sometimes the plantations are owned by large international businesses rather than being family owned… To see cocoa pods maturing on the trees and absorbing the plantation history and uniqueness, and experience the varieties of flavours – well, it doesn’t get much better than that for a chocolate maker.

unique cocoa

Maloko bean to bar chocolate is unique and flavoursome from the intense taste characteristics of the Samoan cocoa beans we use. These are a very rare ‘flavour bean’ cocoa variety called Trinitario. Combined with the other flavour bean, Criollo, they account for less than 10% of the world’s cocoa. The majority is made up by the hardy Forastero variety, which is a world commodity, and the base flavour profile for most commercial chocolate and confectionery.The fact that we have amazing Trinitario trees thriving in our corner of the world is quite remarkable.

As we mentioned earlier, we believe there is beauty in simplicity. Our chocolate is made with a minimal amount of processing – from just two ingredients: pure cocoa and cane sugar. This means Maloko chocolate has a higher than usual cocoa content, as we don’t add extra cocoa butter or other additives like soy lethicin or vanilla flavouring. For those with special dietary needs, it is basically “everything free” except cocoa and sugar. And by ‘cocoa’ we mean ‘cacao’ (as in other parts of the world) or ‘koko’ as it is known in Samoa.

By roasting in small batches we will know – much like wine, the origin, season and year the beans were harvested. There is also the potential for Limited Edition bean blends (using samples of other Pacific Origin cocoa) to create new flavours, all the time experimenting with cocoa percentages.