Wild Tobago

Carlina Jules-Taylor talks with Pat Ganase about her journey to Tonci Chocolate, recently presented at the 2024 Trade and Investment Conference. (All photos courtesy Carlina Jules-Taylor)   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.   The Taylor family: Tadijah, Theo, Carlina and Randy Marie Jules comes from Dominica to Tobago to help out I grew up in Roseau. My father was a fisherman, Elwin Jules. 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 ...

Times of crisis are times of great opportunity, so the Chinese believe. What opportunities will the crisis of a shortage of cacao beans from Trinidad estates bring to a cadre of 21 st century   chocolate makers? Pat Ganase surveys the Trinidad and Tobago industry.     “It is heart-breaking,” says Isabel Brash, “that cocoa production has been declining drastically over the last couple years. It is difficult to plan chocolate production and take orders for even a month in advance. The biggest season is fast approaching; for Christmas we start chocolate production in September.”   Over the past decade, the architect turned chocolate entrepreneur has built her business at the Cocobel chocolate house on Fitt Street using beans bought mainly from the Rancho Quemado estate. She has also worked with beans from other estates – La Deseada in Santa Cruz, San Antonio and independent farmer Anand Narine – and enjoys telling the stories of the flav...