Connecting to the Chocolate Tree

To celebrate our new hot chocolates, we invite our new cacao partners to join us in our studio for an afternoon of chocolate meditation.

“Meditation simply means focusing on something,” says Jennifer Tanner, our guide for the afternoon. We’re sat in a circle on cushions, staring at mismatched cups of hot brown liquid. As we look deeper, different shades of brown appear, some cast under shadows and others shiny with the tiniest bubbles.

We’re asked to pick up and smell the hot chocolate, noticing the warmth of the cup beneath our fingers. The urge to take a sip becomes distracting. But that’s the whole point of meditation, Jennifer explains: to notice the thoughts that derail you and let them go.   

XOCO’s Joyce Pucheu and Frank Homann, sat either side of our writer, Kate. 

Instead of focusing on your breathing or a visualisation, as other meditation techniques do, chocolate meditation involves turning your attention towards the sight, flavour, texture and scent of chocolate. This can bring us into a state of heightened awareness, quieten the mind and help us feel more connected.   

At GAIL’s, we’d also been curious about how this technique could affect our experience of flavour. With two new hot chocolates on our menu this season, we wanted to find out if chocolate meditation could help us appreciate the drinks more deeply or experience the chocolate – from Parisian chocolatiers XOCO – in a new way.  

So, to celebrate our new partnership with XOCO, we invited them to try the hot chocolates with us through a guided meditation led by Jennifer of Soul Space International. And now, we’re sat beside each other with our eyes closed, a little self-conscious, trying not to make any slurping sounds.  

After meditating with our 48% Milk Hot Chocolate – the sweetest and most indulgent-feeling of the two – we move on to our 70% Dark Hot Chocolate. The fruity acidity and intensity of flavour is explosive. If ever you have a chocolate craving, this drink will quench it in one. For many of us, it’s the first time we’ve connected to cacao as a fruit. It tastes almost juicy and alive. 

The chocolate in both drinks is created from single-variety cacao called Mayan Red, a variety that XOCO created from a mother tree discovered on ancestral Mayan land in Honduras. “Mayan Red has all this complexity to it, with the flavour potential of red fruits, like cherries or plums,” says Frank Homann, founder of XOCO. “We call this chocolate a little bit punk because it gives some acidity. You can’t find chocolate like this anywhere in the market.”

That’s because XOCO is the only chocolate maker in the world that uses the ancient agricultural practice of grafting. The rest of the industry plant cacao from seeds – a lower-effort method, but one that’s terrible for flavour. “When you seed plant a fruit tree, you tend to lose the good flavours,” says Frank. Wild apples, for example, are most often extremely tart. 

“More people are realising that food should mean something in our lives. It’s a way of connecting with each other, of connecting to life.”  

The chocolate industry compensates for the bitterness in seed-planted cacao by over-roasting it and adding vanilla. In doing so, all chocolate has ended up tasting very similar.  

This is one of the reasons cacao is always traded at the same price. “We've thought about cacao as a commodity product for so long,” says Frank. “For me, it’s a bad way of going about business.” Not only are we losing all the flavour potential of cacao, but farmers have no bargaining power. As a result, many are stuck living in poverty.  

XOCO are changing all that by paying farmers a premium above the commodity price to help them discover and grow specific varieties of cacao. Grafting involves identifying a fruit tree which happens to have won the genetic lottery in terms of flavour. You then cut a branch from that tree and attach it to another, creating a copy.  

Knowing this makes our meditation especially poignant – it’s hard not to reflect on the story behind the cup. “I was thinking about the 19 years that have passed – about Frank in the fields with the cacao,” says XOCO’s Annika. “And here it is, so powerful, just in a little mug.” 

Today, XOCO is supplying chocolate to businesses across the world and working with farmers to break the cycle of poverty. But getting to this point has taken years of persistence, and a great deal of rejection – especially from the incumbent chocolate makers.  

“The first people that really got the idea were Michelin Star chefs,” says Frank. “They rely on having really good raw materials. We just needed these culinary geniuses to actually taste our chocolate – which took a lot of knocking on doors, and in one instance, jumping over a fence.” 

Frank hopes XOCO is leading the way to more change. “I really hope the big industrial guys are paying attention,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind competition at all. I don’t need world domination. It’s about making them think, ‘aha – I should have done that’.”  

He pauses. “I think it will happen. More people are realising that food should mean something in our lives. It’s a way of connecting with each other, of connecting to life.”  

Much like meditation. With hearts and bellies full, we return to the work of making food with meaning, a little more zen than we were before.