Guilt-Free Chocolate Tasting with Cacao HK

Cacao, a family-run and Hong Kong-based chocolate business, returned to Morningside on Tuesday 25 March to lead its popular chocolate tasting workshop for a group of twenty-five Morningsiders. Cacao prides itself in ‘guilt-free’ chocolate, which they create in Hong Kong using cocoa sourced ethically from the Philippines, Ecuador, Colombia, and Madagascar. As Morningside students learned during the workshop, the harvesting of cocoa in West Africa (where most cocoa is sourced) often utilizes the labour of children who have been sold into slavery, and causes widespread deforestation and environmental degradation. Cacao also makes a point of delivering its chocolate fresh, getting it from ‘bean to mouth’ in just two weeks. For most leading brands, this number stretches to as many as eighteen months.

Besides learning about the chocolate industry, participants got to learn more about what gives chocolate its taste. Students tried eleven different samples which varied widely in flavour, and were surprised to learn that each sample contained only three ingredients: cocoa, cocoa butter, and sugar. Students had plenty of questions for the Gomersall family behind Cacao, and each got to take home a box of pralines.