A Story of Regeneration

THRIVU initially will focus on 5 products that have been selected as a result of their potential impact and alignment with our values; chocolate, coffee, milk, wine, and horticultural products.

THRIVU Native Craft Chocolate

We have started with our first product, chocolate. This phase has different stages of development:

Stage 1: “Nativo by Thrivu” is our line of chocolate made at origin (in the center of origin of cacao; Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil) and experimental manufacturing phase in Michigan.
Stage 2: Direct Sourcing from producing partners at origin and manufactured in the US.
Stage 3: Establish ThrivuHubs; Develop fermentation and drying capabilities at the origin.
Stage 4: Build manufacturing capabilities at origin. This is where we strive to become one of the incredible brands, we started with in Stage 1.
Stage 5: Community and environmental regeneration -

The true story of regeneration is ultimately where we want to be, it’s what our vision is focused on (completion of all 5 stages). Currently, a significant proportion of land where cacao and other crops have been produced in the tropics has deteriorated to the point that fertility has been significantly reduced. As you go through astonishing lush forests in these places where cacao grows, you see huge empty gaps, once cleared for use with monocultures using an extractivist linear model, and now abandoned.

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So, what do we do now? Cacao thrives as an understory tree and needs biodiversity and soil biology to flourish, even more so, the aromatic flavorful beans that we use in specialty chocolate. The best way to start restoring soil fertility is by using mobile inoculators (animals) to provide all this life back into these damaged soils (think about deserts). Thus, we will use ruminants to do this and regenerate biomes (think about thriving prairies).

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What are ruminants? You’ve probably heard someone say, or even said yourself that you need to ruminate on a topic, but where does that word actually come from? Ruminants are animals that have a complex stomach (4 compartments). Some examples of ruminants include cows, sheep, giraffes, and deer. One of the compartments in the complex stomach is called the rumen. This rumen is full of microbes (bacteria, protozoa, fungi, yeast, archaea) that through a symbiotic relationship with the host allow these animals to extract energy and protein from recalcitrant sources. This is the reason why cows evolved to eat grass and thrive. In simple terms, ruminants chew on grass long enough to break it down into digestible parts, much like we might ruminate (or chew) on information until we have broken it down into small enough bits that we can fully digest. There are a significant number of other long, important words and phrases associated with this process that I would be happy to spend time talking through (like volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and anaerobic fermentation), but as I’ve left the classroom for this new venture, I’ll wait for you to reach out to me directly on the topic.

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So, why has the fertility of soil under monocultures been lost? Well, because we wanted a simplistic model without diversity to reduce complexity and enhance yields. And in fact, we were able to achieve this, but unfortunately at a significant cost to our environment. However, we are at a point in human development where technology and knowledge (new and ancestral) can provide the answers to solve this complex problem. Ruminants are essential to restore nutrients, biology, and nutrient cycles into our soils, without them our source of nourishment decays and our plants are deficient in nutrients. This is the first step in restoring fertility to undermanaged lands, after this we need to embrace biodiversity to avoid problems with plagues and lack of fertility. If not addressed, these deficiencies are then passed to animals, humans, and to all our ecosystems. This gap can be attributed to deficiencies related to the provision of unknown primary and secondary compounds. Bio-complexity can provide answers to questions that continue to arise, as ruminants provide some answers to pressing challenges related to the health of the soil, plants, animals, people, and the environment. Valuable clues seem to suggest that when diverse polycultures are used to grow our food, these plants provide limiting nutrients from fertile soils that can remedy this challenge. This bio-complexity also has beneficial effects on carbon sequestration where cacao and other selected crops are key players in restoring ecosystem health when biomimicry principles are applied to resource management.

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Despite attempts to encourage rural communities in the tropics to embrace sustainable practices in agriculture, the current reality reflects a different outcome. After decades of trying to provide small producers with fair income, the result is that it is still not enough. Why? Because most of the added value is not staying in these places, which has a direct impact on the communities, the environment, and the sustainability of our industry. To rectify this situation, we need to reevaluate how this income is distributed. It is impossible to achieve sustainability, regeneration, and biodiversity in ecosystems without a profitable economy that allows communities to escape systems geared towards subsistence agriculture once and for all. We cannot ask small farmers to preserve the Amazon basin and other ecosystems around the world when saving the forest may mean there is no food on the table for their families. Consider for a moment, a different scenario. Let’s say Latin American countries proposed to the US and Europe that they would buy milk for a few cents higher than the commodity price (assuming it was Fairtrade certified and produced fairly), and then process it into specialty cheese, sold primarily in their home countries, but then agree to ship some back at prices that are 20 to 100 times higher than what they paid for the milk. Would the US and Europe jump onboard? Not a chance, yet, that is exactly what we are doing, and hoping that these farmers do not harm their environment as they try to support their families.

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Chocolate and its magic

Chocolate is an indulgence that provides joy to all who consume it (well, almost all, I’m still working on convincing my daughters to consider dark as well as milk chocolate). However, current practices continue to wreak havoc on the environment and people and sacrifice holistic health. We believe in giving this gift of God its true place on the food chain, by doing completely the opposite of what historically has occurred with this superfood. To do so, THRIVU is focused on regenerating and reviving the true life of CACAO, its habitat, its people, and its impact at all levels.