From Dominica to Tobago with cocoa

Carlina Jules-Taylor talks with Pat Ganase about her journey to Tonci Chocolate, recently presented at the 2024 Trade and Investment Conference.

In Dominica, my mother Marie Jules taught me to make drinking chocolate. Her father was an overseer on an estate with cocoa, coffee, coconut. She grew up with cocoa. Her mother, my grandmother, used to process everything on the estate. They squeezed sugar cane daily and boiled the juice to make visou (thick, almost crystallised syrup) which was used to sweeten cocoa and coffee. My grandfather kept cows, so there was fresh milk to add to cocoa.

This estate was in La Plaine. I grew up in Roseau. My father was a fisherman. So my mother left the country and lived in a part of Roseau near the sea called Newtown.

Everyone loves coffee, but poor people could not buy a lot of coffee at once. She would roast and mill coffee and sell the ground coffee by the spoonful. She also made cocoa sticks to sell for cocoa tea. She bought her first cocoa mill around 1976-77, and still uses it. We did not know about making chocolate then.

My mother still processes cocoa for tea. She still makes coffee. She used to buy the dried cocoa beans in the market, make and sell the sticks. She also made fudge – we call it coconut cheese – and sugar cake, which we call tablet.

She was happy not to have to go out and work. She ran her own business, cooking for doctors, professional people. It meant she could be at home when the children came from school. By the time she stopped working, she had one girl and three boys. I was born after she stopped working, the youngest and I grew up with my mom at home. She visits us in Tobago to help us.

In Dominica, the school day ends at 1 pm. We had a mid-morning break at half-past ten. But after one, you were free. It was a shock to me to see children still in their uniforms late in the day in Tobago.

Life was very simple: 8 am-1pm, school. In the afternoon, you could be in the library, in the beach, having an afternoon rest. Later in the afternoon, I would go to the fisheries to wait for my father’s boat. Newtown was one of the first villages to set up a fishing co-op. There were bakeries all around; you could get bread for breakfast and afternoon bread for supper. After that, the bread was stale.

At secondary school, the afternoons were full of activities. I learned to play the violin. My father would take me to snorkel the reefs. He was not a talkative person so it was a good way to spend time together.

I met Randy Taylor at the University of Southern Caribbean, where I worked towards a degree in vertebrate zoology with a minor in chemistry. We were married in 2006 and moved to Tobago, to the home where his great-aunt and great-uncle raised him.

I worked at the Scarborough Library for ten years. Our first son Tadijah was born in 2013 after many miscarriages. Tonci (pronounced Tonjay) was born in 2014. I planned to stop working at the library by September 2017 to home-educate.

But in April that year, Tonci, who was not yet three, was diagnosed with a brain cancer. I resigned immediately. We spent the next months in Trinidad for treatments. He died in October.

Tonci chocolate

It was devastating. I would visit his gravesite every day trying to rationalise the loss. We could still hear him chanting, “Cocoa tea, cocoa tea, cocoa tea,” and his joy, mingled with the aroma of roasting cocoa, evoked his presence.

The idea of chocolates to remember him evolved. I knew about cocoa sticks and cocoa tea. I threw myself into research about chocolate. It wasn’t hard for me, a chemistry student, to understand crystallisation and the making of chocolate.

I bought the first melanger in 2018. We made drinking chocolate, then 65 per cent dark chocolate.

We had to look for sources of cocoa beans. We found some farmers; and depending on their skill at fermenting the beans, we would buy wet or dry beans. I pay a premium price, $75 per kilo of Tobago beans. We would find people who have a few trees in their backyard. Every season, we would buy as much as possible. There are little pockets of estate where we would buy pods.

Small scale but hard work

We do everything. Randy takes care of buying, fermenting and drying. He still works as a guidance counsellor at Speyside Secondary School.

We’ve made a few connections with farmers, but still on a small scale. They are interested because we pay well and there’s awareness that the industry is being revived.

We would like to acquire an abandoned cocoa estate that we can rehabilitate as a source of beans.

Since we started making the chocolate bars, we developed innovative ways of packaging and earning capital for the business. All our packaging is by hand. We cut and shape and stamp the boxes. Chocolate is extremely time-consuming, not just the packaging. We need to include nutritional and allergy information in new packaging.

We are very new in the business. We make drinking chocolate; a 65 per cent dark chocolate bar; a 50 per cent milk bar (using coconut); a 70 per cent guava bar; whole bean coffee and ground coffee. There’s no coffee in Tobago, so we roast coffee beans from Trinidad, mainly
Robusta, which grows best and can take a dark roast.

I’ve done some research, and Trinidad has some 21 varieties of coffee.

Learning at home

Since 2017, I have educated my children at home. Tadijah is 11 now. Theo came along in 2021.

Education at home for Tadijah takes place on a four-day weekly schedule, and we are finished by lunchtime. The curriculum, from online sources, includes the arts – literature (Shakespeare, novels, mythology), math, history and music appreciation. Every day we read poetry and do math. In history, we follow a cycle in world history covering as much as possible and as deep as necessary.

Lessons are about 20 minutes each. In four days, we cover about 15 topics a week.

Outside of that, there are always things to do, in the garden, more reading, exploring.

We recently started offering a roast experience for visitors. It is built around a meal of cassava bread and saltfish salad with cocoa tea. They would see how to roast cocoa and coffee over a coal pot. The process was on display at the recent Trade and Investment Convention, but of course, the coals could not be lit.

Visitors come to us in Plymouth, Tobago for the experience.