The Ku'ia Club is our chocolate of themonth club!

Every month, club members receive a shipment of unique, exclusive chocolate: it could be something new, experimental or a unique single origin that Dan has just visited. For May 2025, the offering was a cacao sourced from Tabasco Mexico. While supplies last, you can actually purchase this chocolate; we almost never offer Ku'ia Club chocolate to the general public, so get it before it sells out! Plus, if you purchase a 50 piece bag of this 68% dark chocolate, you will receive 15% off your entire cart!

With each shipment,  also get an in-depth explanation of the chocolate written by Dan or Gunars! Curious what our Ku'ia Club letters are like, but you're not in the club? Check out our newest letter, written by Dan and Gunars:

Tabasco, Mexico – 68% Dark Chocolate

For the last year and a half, the chocolate world has faced severe turbulence with market prices and volatility reaching unprecedented levels. Prices have soared to nearly $13,000 per metric ton—more than five times the 15–20-year average of $2,500, and are currently hovering around $10,000/MT. This ongoing crisis is the result of consecutive years of bad weather, high disease pressure, and a deeper, systemic failure of a cacao supply chain based on small independent farmers, primarily in West Africa. To make matters worse, a 10% tariff on all imports, including cacao, has added more financial strain, pushing many bean-to-bar chocolate makers over the edge.

Fortunately, at Maui Kuia Estate, we carefully monitor world markets both in the office and the field. While working in Ivory Coast in late 2023, I saw ominous dark clouds gathering, and decided we should purchase significant quantities of cacao. In early 2024, the market started skyrocketing far beyond what seemed imaginable, so we’re relieved to still be working through inventory purchased at normal prices. However, we still need to find new and interesting tasting experiences for our Kuia Club every month, which in the current climate of tight supply and high costs remains challenging. One of our chocolate-maker colleagues in Arizona has been tightening the belt and selling some inventory reserved for special projects to help ride out the storm. As a result, we were able to procure a single 60 kg bag of cacao from the state of Tabasco, Mexico. 

Mexican cacao is rare in the US market, largely due to domestic demand for cacao, especially for traditional drinking chocolate rather than solid bar form. This particular cacao comes from a co-operative known as Camino Cacao. The organization works with about 150 small farmers across nine communities in Tabasco — one of the traditional growing regions of Mexico where cacao cultivation has its roots going back to the Mayan civilization. Camino Cacao is a social enterprise that pays farmers above market price for fresh cacao and manages fermentation in a central facility to foster quality and consistency. Having recently returned from a trip to Mexico where I sampled several traditional chocolate drinks, I was excited to make a first batch of Mexican chocolate back home on Maui. Although I roasted this bag last week, I had to depart Maui before milling, molding and tasting the finished chocolate, so I’ll leave it to Gunars to describe the tasting notes. 

This month’s offering was formulated using 68% cacao.  When evaluating new sources of cacao from which we have never made chocolate before, it is difficult to know what the percentage of cacao should be.  After a few different formulations, we can zone in on the best formulation but we do not have that luxury when we have one bag and one roast and one shot at making the chocolate.  We have recently started making Ku‘ia Club selections at 68% cacao because that seems to be standard for competitions that evaluate the quality of cacao and it balances the flavor profile without going overboard in either direction.

I made the chocolate yesterday, we molded it today, I will be wrapping it tomorrow, and we will send it out immediately to our members, including you.  This chocolate exhibits an interesting combination of roasted nuts, caramel, and chocolate.  After we got the first molds from the line, I demolded one and started tasting it so I could write these notes.  I found that I kept going back to it to taste more, not because I was unsure of what I was tasting but because it grew on me with each bite.

Aloha,

Dan & Gunars