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Captain’s Chocolate is a micro-business that ethically sources their chocolate from Costa Rica, which is quite rare from my research, as oppose to Peru, Ecuador, and African countries. They test their product and post the results, which can be seen here. They are probably the smallest business I’ll be reviewing. This is the first chocolate company I’ve seen that contains no lead. However, their cadmium levels are a little on the higher side. I can recommend Captain’s Chocolate for hand-harvesting their cacao and their hands-on work with the farmers themselves.
Behind the Captain
Captain’s Chocolate is based in a rural town called Neosho, Wisconsin. It was started in 2018 by a brother and sister duo Mark and Sarah; Mark being the captain. Mark is an Alaskan fisherman by trade and has grown tired of the industry, both physically and mentally. He and Sarah decided they wanted to open a business but couldn’t figure out what to do, as neither of them had a business background. Their one caveat to the business was it must improve someone’s life. Having vacationed in Costa Rica and loving the country and being vaguely familiar with the chocolate industry, they decided to take a leap of faith and meet with some farmers to start the business. That’s where we are today.
All In The Family
One of the bigger aspects I like about Captain’s is how they truly are a family business. If you follow their social media, you will see their entire family is in on the operations. Not just that, but four generations of family!! Starting from Sarah’s parents, who are nearly centennials, down to Sarah’s granddaughter that helps pack bars and manage their social media content. With how awful are corporations and how many medium size companies are being purchased by said corporations, I try to support family businesses as much as possible, local or otherwise. Captain’s gets some brownie points for this one.
Social Responsibility
Captain’s Chocolate does not work through a cooperative but with the farmers themselves. I cannot stress how uncommon this is, in a good way of course. Sarah and Mark both personally know the farmers and not only meet with them on a regularly basis, Mark has built houses, rehabilitation centers, cacao equipment, and much more during his many stays in Costa Rica. Sarah travels down for a few weeks each year to help the locals learn to sew products that they sell to tourists to help boost their income. The Captain family is down in the trenches right with the farmers and locals on a first name basis.
Supply Chain Transparency
It’ll come as no surprise that Captain’s Chocolate controls their entire supply chain right down to the drying sheds they helped build and the winnowing equipment in Costa Rica. This is quite uncommon as many companies I’ve come across let the locals handle the processing, but the owners of Captain’s work with the locals to help process the cacao. I suppose the only aspect they don’t truly own is transporting it on the freighter, as owning their own ship might be an unreasonable request.
No Traceable Lead Found? Amazing!
Coming from the indigenous tribes in Costa Rica, this chocolate is hand-harvested which reduces most of, if not all, exposure to lead, as well as using unleaded pickup trucks to transport the beans instead of diesel tractors.
Every chocolate bar I’ve reviewed so far, including the ones in Consumer Reports, contain lead. Seeing as Captain’s tested for no traceable lead levels on the test results was quite rare, so rare I haven’t seen it before. My issue comes with the cadmium levels. Their cadmium levels are quite a bit higher than I am comfortable with. Since the chocolate is hand-harvested, the cadmium will be taken in via the soil. This is a hard problem to solve without extensive soil testing and agronomy skills.
The silver lining here is that they sell their chocolate bars in 60% and 75% cacao quantities. What that means, by sheer volume, we can actually lower the cadmium content since there’s less cacao a bit more sugar. Let’s look at the results.
At 60% cacao, Captain’s Chocolate standard dark has 16g of added sugar. Their bars are 40g total. We can subtract 16g from 40g and we’ll have only 24g of pure cacao content. Since their cacao has 0.2mcg per gram, we multiply 24 x 0.2mcg which gives us 4.8mcg cadmium per bar.
The same is done with their 75%. With 30g of cacao and 10g of sugar, at 0.2mcg per gram and 30g of cacao, each bar will contain 6mcg cadmium per bar.
Their 90% bars contain 7.2mcg of cadmium and the 100% will contain the full 8mcg per bar.
These cadmium levels are pretty industry standard if not a little higher than usual but certainly within the realm of most decent chocolate companies. Coupled with no lead, this chocolate bar is well above average in terms of quality.
Final Thoughts
I think Captain’s Chocolate is a great family startup chocolate company. Their cadmium levels are a bit high but limit your consumption to a half a bar a day if you’re concerned. The fact they have no detected levels of lead in their chocolate is already a huge selling point. Don’t sleep on this little family start up as they are packing some amazing products. I have tried the chocolate covered hazelnuts and I love them so much. Not only that, I love their cacao brew, of which I am currently drinking as I write this article.
I go through about three to four cups of their brew a day. I love it! In addition to cacao brew and chocolate bars, they’ve started some chocolate covered nut products which will naturally have less chocolate and more nut/raisin so you can enjoy a bit more than usual in that case.
