Pierrick Chouard, Founder

Allan Suarez, Co-Founder

Vintage Plantation Chocolates was born out of the friendship of two rugby players: Pierrick Chouard and Allan Suarez. Pierrick has been developing chocolates in Europe and the USA since 1985, while Allan was the founder of Latin media, a social networking web portal.

Worried by the continuous degradation of quality in chocolate, and the mass consolidation of the small farmers bought out by investments consortium set out to grow cocoa hybrids selected for volume instead of flavors. Pierrick Chouard went searching for quality cocoa beans sourced from the farmer to promote indigenous native cocoa beans, and was the first to recognize Farmers needed to be included in the chocolate manufacturing process , to have any chances of increase the quality of chocolate available to the consumers.

In 1996, upon realizing that most small cocoa farmers were squeezed from their land by being prevented direct access to the cocoa market. And were forced to sell through a cascade unscrupulous middle men their cocoa beans, Pierrick started to raise funds for a village of farmers in Dominican republic which were subsequently given to the Rainforest Alliance and a local NGO to administer and help farmers market their cocoa directly.

Subsequently, The Rainforest Alliance invited us to join them in their effort in Ecuador where the rainforest Alliance was developing their first Cocoa program. Allan and Pierrick had already been in Ecuador helping Allan’s Relatives. And agreed to move their program to Ecuador.

The First Farmer’s Chocolate: “Vintage Plantation” was launched in 1997. It was a complete failure due to the lack of reliability of the Ecuadorian Partner we chose. It took us three set backs and 9 years to get a true high quality fermentation controlled farmer’s chocolate. We had to bypass the existing commodity chain, and redesign one from scratch.

Today there are 17 Ecuadorian chocolates, and we are proud to say, we initiated this movement.