Arriba with Conscious Cocoa!
The sweet aroma of this bar alone is huge pick me up. It’s so pure that you can smell it’s chocolaty notes straight through the box. Supposedly, Arriba cocoa, grown solely in Ecuador, is the only cocoa that smells of a floral bouquet even before the beans are roasted. To preserve the precious scent, ingredients like vanilla and other covering aromas are avoided. In fact, this chocolate bar is as straightforward as it’s packaging. What you’re getting is 65% pure Arriba cocoa mass, cane sugar and cocoa butter. What I like even more than the nutty dark chocolate, which I found to be a bit grainy, is that Vintage Chocolate is down with the Rainforest Alliance, a conservation organization dedicated to implementing better business practices for biodiversity. Their mission is to preserve the Ecuadorian rainforest and guarantee a fair price for cocoa farmers. When you buy Arriba chocolate, you support the farmers directly, help preserve the only native cocoa flavor varietal in Ecuador, and safeguard the Ecuadorian rainforest. Now that’s a huge incentive to buy chocolate, not that we ever need one.