This truly raw Cacao powder is a low-fat way to experience the health and zing of raw chocolate. Perfect for blending into recipes. Add Agave and nut milk for an amazing hot chocolate!

Essential Living Foods is the first-ever company to import truly Raw Organic Cacao Powder – a totally unique product that has received rave reviews across the industry.This exciting form of chocolate is created by taking Essential Living Foods’ Raw Organic Cacao Nibs and then cold-pressing the oil from them. The solids are then ground into fine powder, sifted and ultimately packaged as Essential Living Foods Raw Cacao Powder.

What Separates Essential Living Foods’ Cacao Powder From Others

How have we managed to produce such clean, consistent raw cacao powder? Essential Living Foods’ proprietary processes involve fermenting the cacao beans in small, highly controlled batches so that the temperature is never above 120° F. This is in stark contrast to most other cacao products out there, even if they say that they are “raw,” because traditional fermentation results in temperatures much higher. So even though the beans might never be roasted, you still could be losing some of the delicate enzymatic nutrition that our cacao products carefully preserve.

Once the beans are fermented and sun dried, the peels of the beans are removed and the remaining nibs are gently, slowly heated to form cacao paste. This paste is then pressed in a hydraulic press to extract the oil. The oil is cacao butter and what remains is powderized and is our premium quality cacao powder. Without the oil present, the concentration of antioxidants in our cacao powder is really off the charts. Just take a look at this comparison of the top 10 antioxidant foods:


ORAC scores for the Top 10 Antioxidants Foods (per 100 grams)

1) Raw cocoa powder* 95,500
2) Raw cacao nibs* 62,100
3) Roasted cocoa powder 26,000
4) Organic Goji Berries* 25,300
5) Acai Berries* 18,500
6) Dark Chocolate 13,120
7) Milk Chocolate 6,740
8) Prunes 5,770
9) Raisins 2,830
10) Blueberries 2,400

Source: US department of Agriculture/Journal of American Chemical Society

*Brunswick Laboratories MA, USA


Also, we choose only the highest quality beans from an heirloom variety of cacao, the pride of Ecuador and prized the world over by chocolate aficionados, Cacao Nacional Fino de Aroma. Having the best quality beans to begin with allows us to make our Cacao Nibs truly raw and maximally nutritious.
Nutritional Benefits

   * Extremely credible sources, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, Cornell University, Harvard and others have recently presented very convincing evidence that chocolate — including cocoa powder — is one of the world’s healthiest foods.
   * Some experts consider it to be the #1 source of magnesium of any food.
   * Research has shown dark chocolate to also be the #1 antioxidant food, with approximately twice as many antioxidants as red wine and three times as many as green tea.
   * Finally, cocoa also contains an abundance of Phenylethylamine (PEA) and Anandamide, two chemicals that can make your brain feel focused and happy.

This Product Also Goes the Extra Mile In Supporting the Farmers Producing It

Essential Living Foods Cacao products come from an heirloom strain of Cacao, and it grows deep in the pristine forests of Ecuador. Ecuadorian farmers have a rich history of producing excellent chocolate and their cacao products are used by high-end chocolate makers like Dagoba, Terra Nostra and others. These companies enjoy supporting a product that consistently exceeds Fair Trade standards.

To surpass these standards, Essential Living Foods routinely travels to Ecuador to see how the farms are operating. Plus, we pay our farmers DOUBLE what most “Fair Trade” cacao growers get. And we see to it that they work under very favorable conditions. This gives us direct knowledge and assurance that our Cacao products are really doing great things for the people who make them. We wouldn’t have it any other way

ABOUT ESSENTIAL LIVING FOODS.

Social Impact

At Essential Living Foods, we believe that business needs to have a positive impact on the world, using the power of commerce to improve lives, communities, and ecosystems. We strive to be a “good corporate citizen” in a multitude of ways, creating positive social impact with our business model, the partners we choose, giving back a portion of our revenues and profits, how we treat our employees, and the nutritional and healing properties of our products. Everyone who works here feels great about doing something good in the world while earning a decent living at the same time.

Fair Trade

Essential Living Foods started as an importer of unique organic foods, and from the beginning we’ve built our business on paying fair prices to our farming partners. We do our best to go directly to the source whenever possible, bypassing middleman so we can deliver the best value to our customers AND pay premium prices to the growers. There are a few different certifying organizations out there putting a third party seal on these fair trade practices. We are working with all of them to get these seals in place, but even while that is in process, you can rest assured that your purchases from Essential Living Foods is supporting farmers through equitable trade practices!

Giving Back

We don’t just pay fair prices for our foods – we share our success with our farming communities by giving back a portion of what we make.

Sustainability

Sustainability is a big word for us. It means that we have to sustain our business, because if we aren’t profitable and growing, we won’t exist in the future to continue doing the good that we’re doing. It also means that we want to do everything we can to not deplete non-renewable resources and to rebuild and protect fragile ecosystems. We do this at the farm level by the organic agriculture techniques we use, as well as things like powering our office on solar power and buying carbon credits to offset all of our corporate air travel and all of our food import transportation carbon emissions.

Partners

Money flows around and around. We make money from the sales of our products, and we try to do as much good as we can with how and from whom we purchase our foods from. But aside from buying our amazing, healthy, organic superfoods, we also spend a lot of money each year on more mundane items like banking services, legal services, etc. We try to find companies of a like mind to ours to work with. We find that they understand us better, and hence can offer us better service, and we feel good that we can keep the prosperity flowing to other companies doing good in the world. Check out this link to see just some of these great partners we have!