Belize’s Sixteenth Annual Chocolate Fest  

Over the weekend, residents and visitors partook in the annual celebration of the 2024 Chocolate Festival in Punta Gorda. This three-day event highlights the cacao bean, one of Toledo’s most important exports. During the festivities, chocolate lovers were able to purchase a variety of Belizean chocolate and cacao products, as well as other Belizean-made merchandise. News Five’s Britney Gordon attended the event to capture the excitement. Here’s that story.

 

Britney Gordon, Reporting

If you were in Punta Gorda this weekend, then there is a high possibility you stopped by the 2024 Chocolate Fest. The festivities began on Friday, with an evening of wine, chocolate, and culture and ended on Sunday with the Cacao Cup football match. But it was Saturday’s activities that drew the crowd from across the country. The celebration of chocolate was filled with food, dance music, and of course, chocolate. Dennis Garbutt, Chairman of the Chocolate Festival, shared his excitement over the event.

 

Dennis Garbutt, Chairman, Chocolate Festival 0f Belize

“The Chocolate Fest, it’s here. We’ve been celebrating the Chocolate Festival for over 16 years now in Toledo and it’s literally Getting people to come and see Toledo. I represent the Belize Tourism Industry Association and our goal is to work along with the chocolatiers and the producers, the farmers, to make sure that we could turn it into some sort of an agro-tourism product. And it has been doing great. I remember when we just started some years ago, over sixteen years ago. When we started, for example, there was very limited chocolatiers. You could only find two or three chocolatiers across the country. Now you have well over ten chocolatiers producing fine quality chocolate for the rest of, for Belize and for the rest of the world. So this is not just a party. This is a way of life for a lot of people here in Toledo.”

 

As the name suggests, chocolate was the star of the show. A booth that was never without a line was that belonging to Ixcacao Maya Belizean Chocolate. This family-owned business was started back in 2000 and has grown into one of the most popular local chocolate producers. On sale were a selection of bars, jams, and butter made from cacao, but what stood out among the variety of sweets were the bottles of cacao wine on sale.

 

Henry Cho, Chocolatier, Ixcacao Maya Chocolate Belize

“We produce a long list of chocolates, a total of flavors. We have dark and we only have a few selection of milk chocolates. Our primary focus is always going to be dark chocolate.”

 

 

 

Britney Gordon

“So this wine sounds very interesting. Can you walk me through that process of how you get wine from a cacao fruit?”

 

Henry Cho

“Well, the first process of making chocolate is fermentation and the outcome of fermentation would be the production of alcohols. So instead of fermenting for cacao to turn into chocolate, we decided to extract only the pulp so that we could convert it into a wine instead. And gradually it developed alcohols, and so we were able to bottle those up and to nickname it as our cacao wine.”

 

While Ixcacao were the only chocolatiers present at the event, there were several booths selling skin care products that were made using cacao. In celebration of the Chocolate Fest, Indira Andrewin of Coco Love, created a collection of products using chocolate.

 

Indira Andrewin, Owner, Coco Love

“For the cacao fest you made. Okay. For the cacao fest, I made a chocolate collection. So we have four products. We have a body cleanser, a body exfoliant, a body serum, and a body butter. So a lot of people, when they think of chocolate, they just think to eat and it just tastes good, but actually cacao has so much benefits. It has so much antioxidants and these antioxidants help the skin to be youthful and moisturized. So it definitely is beneficial to the skin.”

 

Andrewin explained that she had started her company while she was in high school and was celebrating its ten-year anniversary this year at the festival. We also spoke with Jessica Reyes, owner of Reyes Organic Beauty, who told us about her line of sustainable beauty products. She explained that she makes her own cacao by hand for her products.

 

 

 

Jessica Reyes, Owner, Reyes Organic Beauty

“So as I mentioned we do natural skincare products and pretty much we create natural soap bars and natural skin body butters All of them are based with cacao Pretty much is a pity that we do not produce cacao here as a butter. I had to purchase like a 10 pound bag of the cacao seed, mashed it, grinded, cooked it, and took out like about a hundred grams of it. But if we, we have so much cultivation here in Belize, it would be awesome if we can create those things here in Belize.”

 

Just a few booths down was another selection of cacao infused soaps. Dawn Dean, owner of Barranco Botanics, told us that she prides her products in being one hundred percent Belizean-made.

 

 

 

Dawn Dean, Owner, Barranco Botanics

“I make soap, natural soap. And what makes my soap unique is that it’s one hundred percent Belizean ingredients. The coconut oil that’s in my soap, because soap is oil, that’s what soap is made from, is all produced by ladies in their households from grated coconut, and they bring it to my factory and sell it to me, and then I use different local plants, like jackass bitters, cacao, green banana, madrida cacao, yellow ginger, honey. All of it one hundred percent Belizean.”

 

The event carried on until late into the night, after a day filled with cultural dances, music, and entertainment provided by Ozzy the Clown. The night ended with drinking competitions of Belize’s own Belikin chocolate stout. For anyone who wanted to taste this Belizean specialty, Belikin was there to provide a free sample of the beverage.

 

Britney Gordon for News Five.