Last updated: July 2026
We are careful with the word sustainability. Not because we take it lightly, but because we take it seriously enough to know that the word has been worn thin by everyone who uses it without evidence. A sustainability claim with no numbers behind it is not a claim. It is decoration.
So this is not a statement of values. It is a report.
What follows is a public account of how Blue Valley Chocolate makes sustainable chocolate in Costa Rica: how we hold the land, farm it organically, reforest it, protect what lives on it, and use every part of the cacao plant that passes through our hands. It is an overview drawn from a much larger internal program, one that tracks certificates, laboratory soil data, planting records by species and location, and live research partnerships with institutions in Costa Rica and abroad. We have kept the detail here to what a reader can actually use, and left the technical archive where it belongs, in our working files.
We plan to revise this report once a year. When a number changes, we change it here. When something is still unfinished, we say so plainly. That last part matters more than any single figure, and we will come back to it at the end.
Two Farms in Costa Rica's Northern Cacao Zone
Blue Valley Chocolate farms two properties in Alajuela province, in the Huetar Norte region of northern Costa Rica.
Finca Blue Valley at Llano Azul sits roughly 7 kilometers south of Upala, at the foot of Tenorio Volcano. It covers 13.26 hectares, about 33 acres, and holds 7,184 cacao trees. This is our original farm and the source of all the chocolate we currently make under the Maleku Chocolate brand. It is certified organic under the USDA National Organic Program by Kiwa BCS Costa Rica Limitada, certificate 4191121374, valid through April 2027, and searchable by anyone in the USDA's public organic integrity database under NOP ID 4191121374. Every tree on it grows without synthetic chemicals, under a multi-species canopy, in volcanic soil we have been restoring since the day we took it on.
El Higuerón is a larger and younger project: 84 hectares, about 208 acres, of former cattle pasture that we are turning back into cacao forest. It holds 45,069 cacao trees and 23,401 replants across the estate today. It is not yet producing cacao. What it is doing is more fundamental than a harvest. It is becoming an ecosystem again.
Between the two properties we steward roughly 97 hectares, about 241 acres, and more than 75,000 trees.
What Organic Certification Actually Requires
At our cacao finca at Llano Azul, organic certification is not a logo we earned once and moved past. It is a set of rules that governs what we are allowed to do, verified by an inspector who walks the farm every year.
No synthetic pesticides. No synthetic fertilizers. No prohibited inputs of any kind. Every amendment and every treatment is checked against the National Organic Program standard before it goes near a tree. An independent inspector from Kiwa BCS visits the property annually, reviews our records, inspects the fields, and reports to the certifying body before the certificate is renewed. Our most recent inspection took place in March 2026.
The standard is the USDA National Organic Program, 7 CFR Part 205, the same federal rule that governs the word "organic" on any shelf in the United States. The certificate covers both crop production and the post-harvest handling of dry cacao, and alongside the cacao it lists every companion crop we grow in the same system: banana, coconut, orange, avocado, mango, soursop, achiote, guaba, cas, rambutan, jackfruit, and ginger. That list is the point. Llano Azul is not a cacao monoculture with a certificate stapled to it. It is a diversified organic farm in which cacao happens to be the crop we sell.
We manage the farm in named sections, El Rio, B1, El Huerto, El Chaperno, El Naranjo, because they behave differently. Different canopy, different companions, different pockets of soil and shade. Treating them as distinct places rather than one undifferentiated block is simply how we pay attention.
Turning Pasture Back Into Forest at El Higuerón
When we acquired El Higuerón, it was pasture. Grass, hard ground, and not much else living in it.
Today it is rows of young cacao spreading across 208 acres that are on their way to becoming forest. The 45,069 cacao trees and 23,401 replants now in the ground are the product of our first planting season at real scale, the opening chapter of a transformation we intend to document year by year as the canopy closes and the land fills back in.
This is what regenerative farming looks like when it is built around a crop that pays its own way. The cacao gives the project a commercial reason to exist. The companion species, shade trees, fruit trees, and native plants, rebuild the habitat around it. And beneath all of it, soil that began compacted and exhausted is slowly coming back to life.
Part of El Higuerón is forest we do not farm at all. We protect it, deliberately, as habitat and as a record of what this land was before it was cleared. This is the same ground that once fell under a formal carbon program on the property; the program itself is no longer active, but our protection of that forest has not lapsed. We could clear it and plant it. We have chosen not to, and we intend to keep it that way.
The clearest sign that any of this is working is not a document. It is the wildlife. Through the 2026 rainy season we have recorded regular sightings of howler monkeys moving back into the young canopy, sloths settling into the shaded stretches, and armadillos, anteaters, and margays crossing the property. Nothing about that was staged or introduced. These are wild animals returning to land that could not support them a few years ago, and their return is one of the plainest measures of recovery we have.
Propagating the Best Trees, and Protecting the Rarest Ones
Planting seventy-five thousand trees is a matter of labor. Knowing which trees are worth multiplying, and having the science to multiply them faithfully, is a matter of expertise, and it is where a great deal of our real work lives.
For most of cacao's history, farms have propagated from seed. The trouble with seed is that it does not breed true. Even a pod from the finest tree on the farm yields seedlings that scatter across a wide range of quality. Over years of watching, a handful of genuinely exceptional trees reveal themselves, consistent in yield, resistant to disease, distinctive in flavor. Those trees are the most valuable thing a cacao farm owns. The question is how to make more of exactly them.
The answer is vegetative propagation, and specifically a technique called coppicing. Cuttings taken from the mature canopy of an adult cacao tree root poorly or not at all; the wood is too far along in its development. Coppicing gets around this by cutting a selected tree back hard, which wakes dormant buds near the base of the trunk. The shoots those buds produce are physiologically juvenile no matter how old the tree is, and juvenile shoots root at rates of sixty to eighty percent when they are managed well, a result documented across cacao research in Brazil, West Africa, and Hawaii.
We developed our field protocol for a three-tree coppice pilot at both farms in collaboration with Dr. Ellen Graber of the Volcani Institute's Cocoa Cure Center in Israel, whose published work on biochar and nursery systems shaped our approach. Tree selection is the decisive step, and we are choosing from trees with proven performance across seasons, including our registered Maleku 1 and Maleku 2 varieties. The shoots are struck as cuttings in a biochar-amended substrate, rooted under high humidity, and grafted at around four months, the point at which the research shows grafting succeeds most reliably. From cut to field is roughly eight to nine months.
Running alongside this is an air layering program at Llano Azul, a complementary method that roots a branch while it is still attached to the parent tree. The first specimens are close to ready for the nursery, with visible root development already forming inside the wrappings.
Conservation runs on the same instinct, pointed in a different direction. Herrania purpurea, known here as cacao de mico or monkey cacao, is a wild relative of the cacao tree, native to Costa Rica and Panama and increasingly scarce in the wild. It grows on our land. Visually it reads as a more primitive version of cacao - rounder, rougher-edged, with a thick muddy pod that looks like something cacao evolved away from long ago rather than toward. Its pods hold too few seeds and produce too unfamiliar a flavor for commercial use, so we do not treat it as a crop. We propagate it because it belongs here, planting additional specimens for habitat and conservation, and we intend to survey more of what grows wild on the property over time, particularly in the deep-shade stretches at El Higuerón that suit species like this. We have also found a second wild species growing on the property that we have not yet been able to formally identify. The pods are small, with a distinctive starfruit-like shape that sets them apart from any commercial cacao variety we know. Our current best candidate, based on its appearance and native range, is Theobroma simiarum, a rare wild Theobroma native to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador, whose name in Latin means literally "of monkeys." We are working to confirm the identification. Whatever it turns out to be, it is growing here naturally, it is rare, and we are propagating it. That is enough reason to protect it while we figure out exactly what we have.
Soil, Biochar, and the Work Behind "Organic"
Organic farming is not the absence of effort. It is the presence of a great deal of it, aimed at the things conventional agriculture hands off to a chemical.
At Llano Azul we are in active soil restoration. The volcanic soil here is naturally slightly acidic and rich in organic matter, both good for cacao, but decades of prior pineapple cultivation left it with real deficiencies: phosphorus well below the level cacao needs, iron sharply elevated, pH in need of correction. We are working through a full amendment plan, phosphate rock, lime, and biological inputs, all within organic rules, guided by laboratory analysis from the UCR-CIA lab and by our research partners.
The most forward-looking piece of this is biochar. We are running biochar programs at both farms, including a structured pilot of twenty trees per site across four treatment groups: a control, conventional inputs, a biological fertilizer alone, and that same fertilizer combined with biochar. The biological fertilizer is brewed on-site and applied by hand. The design draws directly on published research into biochar in cacao systems, including Dr. Graber's own work at the Volcani Institute, which has shown that even low rates of biochar can improve growth, nutrient availability, and disease resistance. We are tracking the results across treatments and will fold what we learn into future editions of this report as the data matures.
Every Part of the Plant
Zero waste is not a slogan we adopted. It is a discipline the farm imposes on you when you live close to the crop and refuse to throw the useful parts away.
Every part of the cacao plant that moves through our operation has somewhere to go. The bean becomes the bar, roasted, ground, tempered, and molded at our factory in Brasilito. The nib, the roasted and winnowed heart of the bean, goes into bars, tasting boards, and caramelized preparations.
The pulp, the sweet white mucilage around the fresh beans, is sold as fresh cacao juice in our factory store and as a freeze-dried powder for people who want to taste it at home. The powder exists for an honest reason: the fresh juice ferments within hours, and the powder is how we make that flavor available to anyone who is not standing in the shop the day the pods are opened.
The shell, the thin skin lifted off the roasted bean during winnowing, is brewed into cacao shell tea and served at every tasting. It is light, gently chocolatey without any sweetness, and one of the reliable surprises for visitors who assumed chocolate had only one form.
The pod husk, the thick outer rind of the whole pod, is composted back into the farm as organic fertilizer, closing a loop between the factory and the soil. We are researching further uses for it, including food applications, and will report on those when they are real rather than promising.
At the factory, trimmings, off-cuts, and cosmetically imperfect bars are never discarded. They become tasting inclusions, workshop material, and ingredients for our culinary program. Put simply, we use or return to the land every part of the cacao plant that comes through our doors.
Renewable Energy, With Costa Rica's Help
Our operations run on 99 percent renewable energy, and we can be straightforward about why: this is what the Costa Rican electricity grid is.
The national utility, ICE, publishes generation data each year showing the grid running consistently at 98 to 99 percent renewable, drawn largely from hydroelectric power with geothermal, wind, and solar behind it. Every kilowatt we pull is effectively clean by virtue of operating in one of the very few countries on earth that has reached near-total renewable electricity. The most recent ICE figures confirm this for the current year.
Our drying facility reflects the same instinct on a smaller scale. We built it from timber grown on our own land, alongside recycled and upcycled materials. When we needed a building, we looked first at what we already had.
The Pollinators: A Fly, and a Bee
Cacao has one of the most particular pollination requirements in agriculture. Its flowers are pollinated almost entirely by midges, minuscule flies of the Forcipomyia group, small enough to work their way into the flower's tight structure. This dependence is part of why cacao is so difficult to grow outside the specific tropical conditions where these midges thrive, and our farms sit squarely within that range.
We also keep Mariola bees, a native stingless bee of Costa Rica. The Mariola does not pollinate cacao, and we are careful not to claim it does. What it does is pollinate our companion plants and add to the biodiversity of the farm, and we work to expand it deliberately, building habitat, splitting hives to grow the population, and harvesting the honey. That honey, lighter and more floral than the honey most people know, goes into our gift sets, so the bee that supports the wider farm also ends up, in a small way, in the finished product.
What We Have Not Finished
The most honest thing a sustainability report can contain is a clear account of what is not done. Here is ours.
Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST): Costa Rica's ICT-run certification for tourism operations. We are aiming for the Elite tier, which matches the depth of our experience and education programs. Planned for 2027.
Bandera Azul Ecológica: Costa Rica's national environmental excellence program, run jointly by the Tourism Board, the Ministry of Environment, and the national water authority. It is one of the country's most recognized environmental marks, understood on sight by Costa Ricans and by the travel press. We are evaluating the Climate Change category for El Higuerón and the Productive Activities category for Llano Azul, with committee formation and application planned for 2027.
Carbon neutrality: Costa Rica's national carbon neutrality program, the Programa País para la Carbono Neutralidad, run by the Ministry of Environment, formally recognizes organizations that measure, reduce, and offset their emissions. Given our two farms and our renewable-powered operations, we suspect we may already sequester more carbon than we emit. But we have not yet commissioned the measurement to prove it, and we will not make a carbon claim before we have. The inventory is on our roadmap. The claim will follow the data, not lead it.
Partner-farmer fermentation: We buy wet cacao from neighboring farmers who lack the means to ferment their own, ferment it in our wooden boxes at Llano Azul, and make chocolate that credits their farm as the source for our Blue Valley Chocolate brand. The program is real and active, but not yet formally documented for public reporting. We intend to name and feature partner farms in future editions as those relationships are put on paper.
Mapping the Maleku varieties: Maleku 1 and Maleku 2 are registered and certified. The other named varieties on the farm are growing, under study, and being propagated through the program described above. A full genetic and flavor characterization is a longer-term goal, with possible registration through CONAGEBIO, Costa Rica's national biodiversity institute, as the documentation matures.
What This Report Is Not
This is a public overview, not the whole archive. It does not include every soil figure, every planting record, or every internal target. Those documents exist, and they are the foundation everything here rests on, but they are working files, not marketing.
If you are a hospitality buyer running supplier due diligence, a journalist writing about regenerative agriculture or Costa Rican chocolate, or a researcher curious about how a vertically integrated cacao farm actually operates, we are glad to go further.
Reach out directly at bluevalleychocolate.com/pages/contact.
This report reflects the state of the farms and programs as of July 2026.
Figures, certifications, and program status are reviewed and updated each year.
