Welcome Ma

She’s arrived. Ma is a call to Mother Earth and Ma Cacao. Grounded, steady, unconditional. Ma is a distilled embodiment of our mission to attune deeply with the earth and cacao plants, and to share that connection with others.

Cacao is a powerful plant, here to offer us healing and allyship. Each sip, each bite, is a call home to the earth and to ourselves. An attunement, both humbling and empowering.

Dedication to the earth is the center of our business and the heart of our beliefs as people. Ma is grounded in reciprocal relationship with the earth. Learn more about how our cacao is grown here. There is nothing more true to us than this earth and her medicine. It is holy, it is here. We honor her and listen. 

Ma is everything we’ve always wanted to say with Buddha Chocolate, but in a way that is true to our nature.

We started this business when we were 20 years old. The name Buddha came from our reverence for meditation and spiritual pursuits. It was to connect to the buddha in you and I, in everything. That was almost two decades ago. We’ve wanted to move away from the name Buddha for a long time - since the beginning really. It always felt somewhat inappropriate and appropriative. Buddha is some people’s God and we are not comfortable marketing that. That’s as simple as it gets. We’ve hardly done any marketing for this reason. We made our logo as small as possible. We were trying to hide it, because it never felt quite right. Well now our logo is big, she's stepping forward and bowing down.

But change is hard. It takes a lot of courage, hard work and trust. It’s really hard to let go of something you’ve been building for nearly 20 years that’s well loved and successful. It’s scary and it’s bold. But here we are. We want to be part of building a world that is respectful, inclusive, and true to ourselves.

We are a small mom and pop business, making everything by hand and supporting our family with this work. When we started this business at 20 years old, we had literally no money between the two of us - and starting a business with no capital is a true challenge. The amount of work and hustle we put in during the early years was extreme, to say the least. Working side jobs on top of side jobs, staying up all night making chocolate, figuring out how to make chocolate in the first place - we made so many mistakes and worked so tirelessly for so long. It was a marathon and a true test of our endurance.

But that was a long time ago. Here we are. We’re steady, we’re grounded, we're skilled. I truly believe we make some of the best chocolate in the world. Our cacao quality is superior, our process is fine tuned, our production is streamlined. We’ve matured. We’re Mom and Dad now, times 3.

It’s time for our business to mature as well, into what we always dreamed she would be. Welcome Ma. She just feels right. Like she’s always been here. And maybe she always has been, maybe she was just waiting for us to be ready.