Few people realise that cocoa is grown in Australia. There isn’t a lot of it yet, but there are surprising number of farmers growing cocoa. A few of these farmers are also turning this cocoa into chocolate; from seed to bar, including using locally grown sugar.
We started our trip around Far North Queensland in Cairns. While most are here to visit the Great Barrier Reef or the Daintree Rainforest, both World Heritage Sites, we were here for chocolate. Our first stop was an hour and a half drive south from Cairns towards Mission Beach. The road is lined almost the whole way with sugar cane and banana fields, as far as the eye can see. A sign at the end of the driveways saying Mount Edna tells us that we have arrived, as well as a glimpse of a few rows of cocoa trees. This is Charley’s Chocolate Factory.
Charley’s was founded by Chris and Lynn Jahnke who originally moved over to Queensland from Melbourne in 1994 in search of warmer weather. They purchased a 400 hectare banana farm and converted it to be used for cattle. By 2013, they were looking for a different challenge. Chris had always been interested in fruit trees but after much research found that most just took too long to bear fruit (macadamia trees take 10 years before you can start harvesting). This led him to cocoa.
Most people (including me) assumed that the name of Charley’s Chocolate Factory was inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a very famous book by Roald Dahl. During the tour we discovered that wasn’t the case, “It’s based on a book by John Steinbeck, a US author who wrote Travels with Charley”. Charley, we learnt, is actually a chocolate-coloured dog.
Charley’s has public tours on Sundays and Thursdays for $34 per person that last about an hour. Today, every table was filled with visitors, all wanting to learn more about chocolate. A very enthusiastic Chris greeted the visitors for the first part of the tour, providing some interesting context for cocoa in Australia. In 2000, a research project was run by the Department of Agriculture just outside of Innisfail (close to Mission Beach where this farm is located). It was a major project; $7 million of funding over 6 years, funded by the Federal Government, Queensland State Government and Cadbury. The goal was to work out if cocoa could be grown in Australia and, if so, where. They started with trial plantations in North Queensland, as well as one south of Darwin in the Northern Territory and another near Kunanarra in Western Australia. Cocoa grows within 15 degrees north and south of the Equator around the world, and these places all fitted that requirement.
The trials in Darwin and Kunanarra weren’t a success because although cocoa did well in the wet season, the dry season was too hot, dry and windy for the trees. They did determine that the region between Tully and Mosman in Far North Queensland was the perfect place for cocoa to grow. Charley’s Chocolate was part of these trials.
“When the company started it was a very new industry in Australia” the guide told us. “You couldn’t just ring up a commercial nursery to get 1000 seedlings…you still can’t”. Hybrid cocoa seeds from Papua New Guinea were provided as part of the government trial. Because cocoa is an understory crop that likes shade, the plants start off in a nursery with 80% shade cloth before moving to one with 20% shade cloth. They do have to worry about two local pests. Caterpillars (“a stomach with legs on it”) can destroy a plant very quickly, and Melamies, a common north Australian rodent that likes to suck the sap from the young trees which kills them. They’ve developed a clever natural way of dealing with the rodents though “We turn on the radio before going to bed. A talk show works best. They are shy, nocturnal creatures so they don’t’ like the sound”.
The trees in the field are planted in rows surrounded by a wind break (Wiliwili trees from Hawaii’s). The guide explains to us how their cocoa is grown on a trellis system (“the first of its kind of the world”) originally designed for apples and pears in order to make it cyclone proof and increase yields. Only a couple of trees had pods on them and one had a flower. These are tiny, white, almost like a miniature orchid about 1 cm in diameter. A single tree can have flowers and pods at various stages of maturity at any given time, which means they need to be harvested regularly. As you can imagine, it’s quite labour intensive.
Next the tour visited two small white buildings with a terrace in the middle filled with tables and chairs. In each of the small white buildings are the chocolate making machines. No one was working in there today, but they have a great set up.
Back at the main shed, we took our seats to learn about how the pod is processed. Usually cocoa pods are cleanly cut in order to separate the seeds inside from the husk using a sharp knife. This also allows them to be separated from the white fleshy placenta before processing. After a long discussion about how using knifes is a bit primitive (“Someone sits there all day long cutting into these things with a sharp knife, can you imagine?”) we were shown a machine they use developed by the Department of Agriculture back in 2010 called a pod splitter, followed by a video of the machine in action. It very efficiently partly crushes and chops each pod in half resulting in all of the now cut up husk pieces, placenta and seeds being mixed together and thrown around. This seemed to me like a much messier and problematic way of extracting the seeds but I only saw the video, not the machine in action.
Overall, the tour was very informative, although I found there were a few too many mentions of how their methods are better to what they suggest is a more basic approach taken in Africa. Farmers in Africa “plant a lot of seeds and just leave the trees to their own devices so trees get really big”. The way used here is the “smarter way”. These generalisations are not only untrue, but unhelpful and detract from the quality of chocolate Charlie’s is making.
I always love the moment when people who have never seen the inside of a cocoa pod see if for the first time. You can feel the “aha” moment across the room and the tour does a great job at bringing visitors through the process, from harvesting onwards. The wet beans are fermented in a small wooden bin for 4 days and beans are dried on red crates outside in the sun for 6 further days. At this point they are ready to be made into chocolate. Some of their bars use their own beans, some use beans sourced from nearby farms. Several bars are made from beans from Papua New Guinea as well. Their cocoa butter is from Venezuela and Peru and sugar is Australian; not surprising given how much sugar grows in this region!
The session ends with a generous tasting of several of his single origin and flavoured options. We left with the Mount Edna bar 70% as well as one with Davidson Plum, a native fruit that is very popular with the local cassowaries (a wild and very dangerous bird found in these parts of Australia). It is grown and dried locally. The milk chocolate options use 52% which I also enjoyed. They use full cream milk which they say gives a slight caramelised flavour to their chocolate. The packaging was recently refreshed to give a sense of the region. A local artist produced several different panels for them to use and these really transport you to Far North Queensland.
I will note that their toilets are surrounded by cocoa trees which the kids found really special. Random, I know.
At the time I visited, this was the only cocoa tour you could take in the region. We need (and will be getting) more tours like this here in Australia, as it’s a great way to raise the profile of cocoa in Australia. Few Australians realise that we don’t just have incredibly talent bean to bar makers; who take the beans and turn them into chocolate, but we also grow cacao. Few of the main chocolate consuming countries can say that they do both.
Charley’s doesn’t make a drinking chocolate, but we turned one of their bars into one using milk produced locally in the Atherton Tablelands for a truly 100% Queensland made hot chocolate. We enjoyed it at Old Mates, a stunning campsite in the Atherton Tablelands. Charley’s chocolate bar makes one beautiful hot chocolate, very fruity and bright but still with enough chocolatey flavour to leave you feeling you have satisfied your sweet tooth. One bar was enough for all four of us to have a generous mug each.
Charley’s Chocolate, 388 Cassowary Drive, Mission Beach, Queensland Australia
