On the shores of Lake Atitlan, in the small lakeside town of San Marcos la Laguna, Guatemala, a different kind of cacao company has been quietly building something since 2019. Cacao Source did not start as a brand looking for a market. It started as an attempt to answer a simpler question: what would it look like to source cacao the way it was meant to be sourced, through direct relationships with the land and the people who tend it, rather than through an anonymous commodity chain.
That question shaped everything that followed
Guatemala is one of cacao's ancestral homes, with cultivation along its Pacific and Caribbean lowlands dating back thousands of years, long before the plant ever reached a global market. Cacao Source built its model inside that history rather than around it, working in the Solola highlands by Lake Atitlan and extending into two very different growing landscapes: the Pacific coast region of Suchitepequez, and the Caribbean lowlands of Izabal along the Rio Dulce, where a small eco farm run by co founder Laurence works directly with Q'eqchi communities.
Each origin carries its own ecology and its own relationship to the people who grow there, and Cacao Source has resisted the instinct to blend them into a single uniform flavor. Every block is traceable back to the landscape it came from. The heart of the operation, though, is in San Marcos la Laguna itself, where the cacao is finished.
Beans arrive already harvested, fermented, and sun dried at the farm of origin, carrying the groundwork of flavor that no later step can manufacture. From there, Cacao Source works primarily with oven roasting, a method the team has refined for consistency and for preserving the nutritional integrity of the bean, while still offering fire roasted cacao on request for those drawn to the older, more ancestral technique still practiced in a handful of Mayan communities.
The roasted beans are ground at the town's local corn grinder, adapted specifically for cacao, then molded into blocks by hand.
That last step is where Cacao Source's identity becomes most visible
Every single seed that goes into a block is hand peeled by Kaq'chikel women working in collectives based in San Marcos la Laguna, more than forty women across several groups, each led by a woman who takes responsibility for the quality of her collective's work. Cacao Source has invested training and resources into these collectives since the beginning, and today roughly half of them have grown independent cacao projects of their own alongside their work for the company. One former production assistant, Leobardo Mejia, became the first man to lead a collective within the organization before going on to found his own venture, Ijatz Cacao. A new fund launched in 2026 redistributes a share of year end proceeds directly back to the women's collectives as a form of gratitude for their work, with Cacao Source covering the administrative costs so that contributions reach the collectives in full.
What began as a small, local sourcing relationship has since reached a genuinely international
footprint. Cacao Source ships its ceremonial cacao directly from Guatemala to customers around the world, and it has built a loose network of what it calls cacao stewards, independent practitioners and small businesses in places like British Columbia, Finland, the French Pyrenees, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and several corners of the United States, from Los Angeles to Vermont to the Hudson Valley, who distribute Cacao Source's origins closer to their own communities and host ceremonies and gatherings built around it. The company also runs in person immersion programs in Guatemala itself, week long and multi day journeys that bring participants to visit farms, meet the women's collectives, and sit with a
Mayan fire ceremony, alongside an online course for those who cannot travel. Since 2019, more than one hundred people have gone through the in person training.
The scale of the impact is easier to see in the numbers Cacao Source publishes
Since it began, the company reports having shared over 120,000 pounds of regenerative cacao with the world, built on a circular economic model in which all profit stays inside the project and every team member, whether based in Guatemala or abroad, is compensated on equal footing within the Guatemalan economic context. Cacao Source also commits to publishing biannual impact reports detailing how funds are allocated, a level of financial openness that is unusual in an industry where supply chains are often opaque by design.
Underneath the logistics is a fairly direct philosophy: cacao is not a commodity to be extracted and sold, it is a relationship to be maintained. That shows up in how the company talks about sourcing, in how it structures compensation, and in how it frames its own growth, measured not just in pounds shipped but in how many collectives have become self sufficient and how many communities, from the highlands of Solola to the Caribbean coast of Izabal, remain active partners rather than static suppliers. It is a model built slowly, from a single town on the edge of a volcanic lake, and it offers a useful reminder of how much texture and labor sits behind a single block of ceremonial cacao, long before it ever reaches a cup.
