Flowstate Chocolate: The Philippines, Mexico, and our Shared History of Cacao

cacao tapestry by runlenarun redbubble.com/people/runlenarun

It is said that life is like a tapestry. Day-to-day, you only see the back part, with those multicolored loose ends of strings that don’t really make sense.

Once in a while, you see the front of the piece. Those interweaving strings form a pattern after all.

Sometimes you are given a glimpse of what the tapestry could be. Your choices and your work can weave together something beautiful, something meaningful. That part of the tapestry is not yet woven, but voices guide you on which strings to thread. You just need to listen and to trust.

In ancient mythology, this is a visitation by a muse.

Modern guides for creative work still use the same imagery. A few years ago, I read Liz Gilbert’s book Big Magic. I liked it so much, I immediately made it into my playbook for creative work.

She has this unbelievable idea in the book, definitely on the woo side, but is the most accurate description I’ve encountered of the experience of inspiration. Liz Gilbert sees ideas as beings from beyond this world whose mission in life is to be made manifest in our world. For this to happen, they need to partner with a human. They search the world for the right partner. When they find the one, they present themselves. Sometimes this is a thunderous apparition. Sometimes they sprinkle our days with quiet serendipities. We can say Yes, we can say No, or we can be so preoccupied with the loose strings that we cannot hear the voices from the front side of the tapestry.

I decided to listen to inspiration and say Yes to them after reading that book. It has been quite a journey since then.

The calling of cacao

Cacao has given me my clearest experience with the voice of inspiration. It was late May or early June, 2019. I was visiting Davao, the region which produces 80% of Philippine cacao. I was awakened around 4am, with my heart racing. I just saw the whole thing. The brand presented itself—Flowstate—and visions of some sort of business flowed from there. I was going to bring drinking chocolate to modern urban aesthete.

I worked on that business with my brother, Peter. We pitched to coffeeshops, organized chocolate tastings, sold bottled chocolate direct to consumers. Product development was a lot of fun (it was essentially making and drinking a lot of chocolate). Sales, marketing and production was a lot of work.

I had to say Yes to that muse in some way. That fateful day and the ensuing adventure was just the culmination of many months of incredible serendipities.

My Ratatouille moment

Months before that, in March of 2019, I spent a few weeks in La Castellana, a rural town in a nearby island famous for its sugar plantations. It so happened that there was an experimental cacao farm nearby, so I and a couple of my buddies paid it a visit.

Most of the cacao in the huge plantations of Davao are from varieties bred for size in the cacao labs of companies like Mars, with names like UF18, BR25 and W10.

Christopher Fadriga, the owner of that farm I visited, wanted to preserve the cacao varieties that we got from Mexico through the Galleon trade from the 17th to 19th centuries. They are smaller than the agribusiness clones; they were bred by our ancestors for flavor. Chris has been collecting cacao scions (living twigs that can bear fruit after grafting to cacao trees) from across the country, sometimes right before the trees were bulldozed to make way for condominiums.

After giving me and my friends a tour of his farm, he let us taste the first batch of chocolate bars made from his first harvest.

Remember that scene in that animated movie with the rat chef? At the climax of the film, the hardass food critic tasted the chef’s ratatouille, a simple dish from rural France. When it hit his palette, he was transported back to his childhood, and his dour face transformed into one of pure joy.

That happened to me on the farm. That bar was a wild kaleidoscope of flavors compared to commercial chocolate. I must have memories of those flavors, because that bar was like a tunnel through decades, connecting me to my 10-year-old self, who was one lucky boy, having had a supply of chocolate made from beans from his grandma’s backyard.

It was the most intense experience I had with flavor and memory. I had to hold back the tears as I drove back. Weeping because of chocolate is not allowed in the rules of Filipino machismo.

Invisible cacao connections

My craziest cacao serendipity happened a month prior to that.

I went to this coffee shop called Tightrope one Saturday. I found out that they were experimenting with a drink using chocolate from Malagos, an award-winning chocolate producer, so I just had to try it.

The cafe was almost full, so I sat at the common table. I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation between two guys at the same table. There was a fellow who was talking about coffee and cacao.

Turns out he was a Canadian coffee consultant, who has been obsessed with cacao and has been traveling around the world visiting cacao farms.

So two guys from opposite sides of the world, who happen to have the same obsession, sit at the same table in the same cafe at the same time. How insane is that?

I introduced myself to him. Vasilly Lissouba was his name. Even if I didn’t reach out, we would have been introduced to each other. The owner of the coffee shop, Gabe, knew of our common interest. Not knowing that I already took the initiative, he introduced us again. Vassily later introduced me to Christopher Fadriga.

He’s no stranger to serendipities in coffee shops. In fact, he sat at the common table for that reason. He explains this in a podcast I later did with him.

Inspiration calls and we answer with our craft

I recently transferred to the country’s cacao capital, Davao. For two years prior to the transfer, I had made frequent trips to the city. On the first of those trips, in October of 2018, another unlikely serendipity happened.

I rarely check Linkedin, but I did so a few days before that trip. There I saw a video by Kenneth Reyes-Lao, someone I knew in the Manila tech startup scene. In the video, he explained that he and his wife Sheila were leaving tech and moving to Davao, to start a chocolate business. I reached out to him and we met in Davao. He eventually introduced me to farmers who became my suppliers for Flowstate.

Kenneth talks about their origin story in this podcast with Dame Cacao.

I feel some sort of connection with people like Kenneth and Vassily. Perhaps it was the same muse that called us, and we each answered in our own way. Kenneth and Sheila built a farm-to-web chocolate business, Cacao Culture. Vassily traveled the world visiting cacao farms. My brother and I did Flowstate.

Flowstate Chocolate, the book

The pandemic eventually killed Flowstate, the chocolate business. The coffeeshops we sold to had to close for around a year, and in our nine months of experimentation, we could not find a viable business model. It could not even pay for itself.

In Big Magic, Liz Gilbert relates how she was once gifted an idea for a novel, a romantic adventure set in Brazil. It was the thunderous kind of inspiration. But life happened, so she had to shelve the book-in-progress. After two years of neglect, the novel was dead. Her manuscript was intact, but the magic left her.

This is a common experience. “Inspiration is perishable - act on it immediately,” we read in the Naval Ravikant cannon. What makes Liz Gilbert’s lost novel noteworthy is what happened to that idea.

She relates that during that time she became friends with another novelist, Ann Patchett. After months of growing their friendship through letter-writing, they met up and shared what they were working on. They were astonished to find out they worked on novels with almost exactly the same storyline! Comparing their timelines, the inspiration for that novel died in Liz Gilbert at around the same time it first sparked in Ann Patchett. “And that, my friends, is Big Magic,” writes Liz Gilbert to end the chapter.

Knowing this, I thought that perhaps I was just a channel for Cacao to reach my brother, Peter, who is an artist and craftsman (to the Very Online, he’s an NFT artist and solarpunk craftsman), and my work was done. I was relieved, to be honest.

Sometime in those nine months of Flowstate, Peter started to produce chocolate bars. He visited our grandma’s garden and the cacao trees were still there! He got some pods, and fermented, dried, and roasted the beans himself. The chocolate bars he made had the cleanest flavor of citrus I’ve experienced, with a dark berry finish. He has since started a farm and has planted some of those seeds from our grandma’s trees, as well as seedlings from the government. Cacao takes around three to five years to grow from seed to a fruit-bearing tree, so perhaps in a couple of years, my brother can start producing seed-to-bar chocolates.

I went on to work on other projects. One of them was writing my first book, Professional Project Management with Roam. It sold well, considering that the only ones who could read it are users of the bleeding edge “tool-for-thought” software Roam Research. All the reviews so far are five-star.

That book was a prototype for a repeatable writing process that seems to work for me. It has opened a future for me where writing is not just a passion project, but a professional endeavor.

As soon as I got this new channel to manifest ideas, cacao came back. When I started that first writing journey, I made a list of books I wanted to work on (see this twitter thread) but the most persistent has been the one not on the list.

That voice is Cacao’s, and as I near my trip to Mexico City, it has only gotten clearer.

The threads I need to weave

I just had to meet Kenneth after seeing his Linkedin life update about chocolate. For years, there has been in me this growing yearning for some ideal chocolate beverage. I would order hot chocolate in most coffee shops I happen to visit. I was disappointed most of the time. They were usually bland, sugary, soulless imitations of the beverage I had in my mind.

That ideal was undoubtedly planted by my grandmother. She made these coins made of 100% chocolate from her cacao trees, which she would use to make the drink. She must have noticed how much I liked it because at one point she showed me each step of the process, from the harvest, to the drying, to the roasting, and finally the grinding.

Cacao arrived in our islands in the 17th century, brought by missionary friars who grew to love this beverage invented and enjoyed by Mesoamericans for centuries prior. By the time of my grandmother, Filipino families tended cacao trees in their backyards and had their own tradition of preparation and pairings—mostly with various rice pastries.

In a few weeks I’ll be in Mesoamerica, the motherland of cacao. I’ll be staying in Mexico city for a month. I have business and cultural reasons to justify my trip. But really, it was another voice calling me from across the Pacific.

A few days after I got my visa, the vision of writing a book about cacao through that trip has overtaken my mind. I have yet to schedule one business meeting, but I have made several cacao connections. My guess is that they also heard the same call and answered it in their own way. I can’t wait for the eventual serendipities.

I don’t know yet how this eventual tapestry will look like, but I have an idea of the threads I will need to weave to create it.

One thread is certainly my own story with cacao, as well as the stories of the people I met and will meet through cacao. I will meet many of them in Mexico.

Another thread is the shared history of the Philippines and Mexico, perhaps seen through the journey of cacao in both countries.

Then you have the story of craft chocolate and of people obsessed with flavor, theobromine as a psychoactive molecule, the cacao ritualists, the global economics of cocoa, the slave-like conditions in cacao production in West Africa, the domination of Europe in the cacao trade, the untold story of flowstate chocolate… and who knows what I’ll discover in the next few months.

I’m here to listen.