Cacao Noir is a two-person workshop on the east end of Toronto. We buy single-harvest cacao from the farms that ferment it, roast it twelve kilos at a time, and stone-grind it for three days until it needs nothing but a little cane sugar. No vanilla to round the edges. No lecithin to fake the snap. Just the bean, the way the soil made it.
What goes into one 70-gram square
Beans bought direct from farms we've stood on
Industrial chocolate is engineered to taste identical in every bar, forever. We do the opposite. Every step below exists to keep the flavour the farmer grew — and to refuse the shortcuts that would erase it.
We buy direct from co-ops and estates that ferment and sun-dry their own beans, and we pay well above the commodity price. Good fermentation happens in wooden boxes, in the days right after harvest. You cannot fix it later, and we don't try.
Twelve kilos at a time, profiled bean by bean. A few degrees too hot and the fruit turns to ash.
We crack the roasted beans and blow the papery husk away, leaving only clean nib for the grinder.
Granite wheels turn nib and a little cane sugar for sixty-plus hours, until the grit disappears and the texture turns to silk.
We rest the chocolate so the flavour settles, then temper every batch ourselves for a clean snap and a slow melt.
Same recipe, wildly different bars — because the bean does the talking. We taste every batch blind before it earns a wrapper, and we write the flavour notes the way they actually hit the tongue, not the way a marketing deck would.
A rare white-bean cacao from the dry forests of northern Peru. Ripe banana, toasted pecan, and a whisper of citrus. The bar we hand to people who swear they don't like dark chocolate.
Grown in a village you can only reach by boat. Soft red plum, brown sugar, and a long, almost floral finish. The most famous cacao on earth, and worth every bit of the fuss.
Big and bright. Sour cherry, fresh raspberry, and a tang like good red wine. High percentage, but the fruit never lets it turn bitter.
Deep and grounding. Roasted coffee, molasses, and a hit of dark toffee. The one we reach for after dinner with the last of the wine.
Milk chocolate for grown-ups. Cacao, milk powder, and cane sugar, ground until it tastes of dulce de leche and warm hazelnut — no additives doing the heavy lifting.
Our Bahia bar, finished with flakes of Vancouver Island sea salt. The salt lands, the toffee answers, and the square is gone before you meant it to be.
"Ethical" is one of the most abused words in food. We'd rather show the receipts than print a logo. Here's what direct trade actually looks like on our bench.
We buy from the same farms year after year and name every one on the wrapper. If we can't tell you who grew it, we don't sell it.
We pay two to four times the commodity cacao price, and more for exceptional lots. Quality is grown — and growers who are paid for it grow more of it.
Our supply chains are short enough to verify in person. We work with co-ops and estates we visit, not anonymous lots traded on a spot market.
Spent husk becomes cacao-shell tea and garden mulch; off-cuts go into our baking bars. A good square shouldn't cost the earth two more bars in waste.
“I bought the Piura bar as a gift and ended up eating the whole thing standing in my kitchen. It tasted like banana bread. I had no idea chocolate could do that without a single thing added to it.”
“I've run a pastry kitchen for fifteen years and I'm fussy about couverture. Cacao Noir's Bahia is the cleanest, most consistent single-origin I can buy in this country. It's the only chocolate on my dessert menu now.”
“The Club shows up the first Friday of every month and it's the only mail I'm glad to get. Two origins, a card on the harvest, and a flavour I can never quite predict. It ruined supermarket chocolate for me, and I'm not sorry.”
Every bar is 70 grams, wrapped and stamped with its origin and harvest. Free shipping across Canada on orders over $50.
Try one origin, no commitment.
Our best work, before it sells out.
For cafés, pastry kitchens & corporate gifts.
Because two-thirds of a grocery bar's price is sugar, vanilla, and marketing. Ours is mostly cacao — and cacao we paid a real price for. Eleven days of work go into 70 grams. It's a small luxury, and it's meant to be one.
Every bean in the bar comes from one region's single harvest — sometimes one farm. That's why our Peru bar tastes of banana and our Tanzania of sour cherry. Blended commodity chocolate averages all of that away on purpose. We don't.
Bitter usually means cheap beans or a careless roast. With well-fermented cacao and a light roast, a high-percentage bar tastes of fruit and nuts, not ash. Start with our 70% bars and work up — most people are surprised how far they get.
Cool, dark, and away from the fridge — chocolate hates humidity and steals smells. Sealed, our bars hold their best flavour for about a year, though no bar in this workshop has ever lived that long.
Across Canada year-round, free over $50. We pause U.S. and overseas shipping through the warm months so your bar doesn't arrive as a puddle — sign up for a restock note and we'll tell you when it's cool enough to send.
We open the bench for tastings the last Saturday of each month, and you'll find us most weekends at the market on Sterling Road. Watch a batch get tempered, taste straight off the stone, and buy before it hits the shelf.
Pick a single origin, or let the Club surprise you the first Friday of the month. One honest square, and the grocery aisle is never quite the same again.