An exceptional chocolate to enchant you

A rare artisanal know-how

At Encuentro, we are proud to be one of the few “bean to bar” artisans who directly work from cacao beans. In France, less than 2% of the chocolatiers actually craft their own chocolate.
Finding the finest cacao beans and bringing the best out of them with a specific roasting and conching: this is our job at Encuentro.

Pure Origins and Single Harvest Chocolates

Each chocolate bar is made from cacao beans from one country and unique terroir. No
mixing. That way, you can taste and discover the richness of the notes of each of those
terroirs.
Moreover, we always work with beans from the last harvest of each of our producers.

Only 2 ingredients

Only two ingredients are used in our bars: cacao beans and organic cane sugar. They do not contain any additives: no extra cacao butter (a bean already naturally contains 50%), no soya lecithin, no vanilla, no salt. This allows us to get a pure and authentic taste.
This is a rare approach in the chocolate industry because it makes the crafting process more complex, therefore slower. In France, chocolate makers traditionally add between 10 to 15% of extra cacao butter. This is not the case for us!

Several months of maturation

The chocolates you tasted have matured from between three to six months, under the form of 6 kilos bricks before being transformed into bars. Maturation can last as long as 18 months for our 85 % and 100 % cacao. This allows for more fullness and harmony at tasting!

What is an exceptional cacao?

An exceptional cacao is first a cacao that has quality genetics, and thus a potential for
developing aromas. Among the wanted cacao trees, we find the Criollo, the Trinitario and the Chuncho, the three which we work with. The forastero, less reputed, can sometimes be excellent, as our cocoa from the D.R. Congo proves. However, genetics are not everything!

This potential for aromas must be revealed. Here lies all the producer’s work through the
fermentation process. This step will allow the aromas precursors to appear, which we will
later completely reveal, in our factory in Lille, during the roasting step!

Fermentation consists in placing the fresh beans, once removed from the cacao pod, in big wooden boxes, which are usually covered with banana-trees’ leaves to prevent air from entering. This step takes from 3 to 7 days, with several stirrings, varying from the cacao type.
The beans are then dried, and placed into burlap bags, and this is how we receive them in our factory.
Without a mastered fermentation, even an excellent cacao would be low in aromas!

Roasting, crucial step to reveal the aromas

Roasting is the step during which the aromatic precursors will be transformed into real
aromas. For each cacao, we have chosen a different roasting profile (temperature, timing) which best reveals its aromatic richness. This is thus a subjective choice, one in an infinite number of proposals, the one we like!
During the roasting, we have looked for a balance between the top, heart and base notes... the same way you would create a perfume!

A committed and eco-responsible approach

A fair price for the producers

We have historically purchased our cocoa at an average price three times the stock market price, because it is fine cacao that is properly/very well fermented. This represents an average price of 10 000 € per tonne, when the cacao listed on the stock exchange is sold for a price fluctuating between 3 000 and 4 000 € per tonne. Since January 2024, the price of low quality bulk cacao, listed on the stock market, has exploded due to high demand and lower production yields (less than 400 000 tonnes). This impacts the price of our fine cacao as well.

A certified organic production

Our manufacture is certified organic and we are audited every year to validate our processes and the traceability of our products. However, this is not a sales argument for Encuentro: it is actually a prerequisite since the start of our adventure, a necessity for the future of our planet!
We are ready to pay our producers more in order to value this approach. Some of our cacaos are not certified organic because the producer does not yet have the means to do so, but they have been analysed and are free of pesticides.

A zero waste approach

When making chocolate, there is usually between 25 and 30 % of the cacao that is wasted during the winnowing step. This mix of cacao nibs and husks is composted or simply discarded.
At Encuentro, we have developed specific processes to value 100% of our cacao. Thus, with 1kg of roasted cacao beans, we produce:
> 800g of cacao nibs (to produce our chocolate)
> 200g of cacao husks (to produce our delicious infusion)

Tasting advice

To get the best of the notes of each terroir and understand their differences, we advise you to drink some cacao infusion in between each square!
We usually sort our chocolate bars into three families : 

• Fruity & Tangy (Madagascar, Peru, Mexico, El Salvador), 
• Fruity (Bali, Guatemala),
• Gourmandes (D. R. Congo, Haïti, Dominican Republic, Bolivia)

-1-
Smell and take a look at your chocolate bar!
Open it and smell its primary notes. The color of the chocolate sometimes differs a lot from one terroir to another.
-2-
Break a square! The sound of it must be clear, the proof of a good tempering of the chocolate.
Place it on your tongue against your palate, without biting it.
-3-
Enjoy! Time is a very important element in chocolate tasting. Let it slowly melt so that it can best express each of its notes. Each chocolate has its own tempo. Floral attack, middle notes, tertiary notes, allonge.

Don’t hesitate to share what you taste!
Do not forget: each palate is unique.

The notes we give you as reference are those we tasted.
Your experience will certainly be different than ours!

Our awards

• BEST OF in 2025 from Salon Gourmet Selection in Paris
• 1 star- Great Taste in 2025 
• Gold Epicure (equivalent to best French chocolate) in 2019, 2020, 2021 & 2024 from a jury of starred chefs and gastronomy experts.
• Gold Star from le Club des Croqueurs de chocolat (in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) 
• “25 Best of the Best” Price at the Salon du Chocolat 2019
• "Rising Star" Price at the Salon du Chocolat 2018