Many people are wondering how To'ak Chocolate can charge $260 for a single bar of chocolate. New DNA tests confirm that one of the reasons is genetics; To'ak Chocolate is sourced from cacao trees that represent one of the last genetically-pure remnants of a rare heirloom variety called Nacional.

Native to Ecuador and famous for its complex flavor profile, Nacional cacao was considered by many of Europe's earliest chocolatiers to be the world's most prized cacao in the 1800s. The variety was nearly driven to extinction in 1917 after the outbreak of Witch's Broom disease, and in recent years many experts did not believe that pure Nacional cacao trees still existed. Based in Ecuador, To'ak co-founders Jerry Toth and Carl Schweizer found a grove of Nacional cacao trees growing semi-wild in the valley of Piedra de Plata, deep in the hills of coastal Ecuador. The trees were planted at the turn of the century.

Toth and Schweizer brought leaf samples from the trees to research geneticists Dapeng Zhang and Lyndel Meinhardt at the USDA's Sustainable Perennial Crops Laboratory in Maryland. Genetic analysis by Zhang and Meinhardt confirmed the existence of the pure Nacional genotype among these samples. Dr. Dapeng Zhang writes, "Our hypothesis is that these trees represent the original Nacional cacao cultivated in Ecuador before the 1920s. After that, most of the trees were destroyed by the [Witch's Broom] disease, and the original variety was replaced by hybrids, which are more disease resistant."

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