There is a convention in craft chocolate that goes largely unspoken but is observed almost universally. Dark bars are serious. Milk chocolate is not. A maker who has spent years tracking down rare cacao, building relationships with farmers, learning the precise temperature at which fermentation produces the right acids and the wrong ones — that maker does not, as a rule, end up making a milk chocolate. The category carries associations that careful people prefer to avoid. Too sweet. Too commercial. Too much the thing that craft chocolate exists in opposition to.

Cacaosuyo made one anyway.

The company was founded in Lima by Eduardo Lanfranco and Samir Giha with a straightforward ambition: to make the best possible chocolate from Peruvian cacao. Not the best Peruvian chocolate. The best chocolate, full stop. They began in 2013 with a dark bar from Piura, a region in the northwest of the country near the Ecuadorean border where several rivers descend from the mountains and irrigate the coastal plantations year-round. The cacao there is called Piura Blanco — a native variety whose beans are pale rather than the usual purple-brown, a genetic condition that produces a caramel depth and a natural sweetness that most cacao varieties arrive at only with the help of additives.

In 2014, with their own equipment finally in place, they began testing the Piura Blanco with milk.

The logic was not commercial. It was curiosity. The white cacao's character at 50% — the balance of sweetness, the caramel register, the way the fat content of the milk interacted with the particular chemistry of the Blanco — produced something they hadn't tasted before. They added vanilla. Not extract from a bottle but actual vanilla, grown in the Peruvian jungle by a farmer who had brought the seeds from Mexico, the variety's country of origin. The seeds, like the cacao, belonged to this part of the world in ways that industrial supply chains had long since forgotten.

The bar went to the International Chocolate Awards in 2015.

It won. Not a category prize. The overall. Best Milk Chocolate in the World.

The judges at the 2021–22 World Final reached the same conclusion. Same bar. Same verdict. Seven years apart. In a category where most entrants change their recipes, reformulate, adjust — Cacaosuyo changed nothing, because nothing needed changing.

The flavour opens with caramel and raisins. Then butterscotch, honey, a long clean finish with the vanilla arriving quietly at the end the way good vanilla does — present but not announced. The texture sits closer to dark chocolate than to anything the word milk usually implies. There is no powdery sweetness, no coating quality, none of the characteristics that make most milk chocolate a thing you eat without thinking about.

This bar asks you to think about it.

Cacaosuyo makes their chocolate in Peru, from Peruvian cacao, at their own facility in Lima. Full traceability from tree to bar. They pioneered a shaded drying technique — pre-secado — that removes unwanted aromatic compounds from the fermented beans while preserving the nuanced flavours that most makers lose in the rush to dry. It is an extra step that nobody sees and that changes everything.

The Piura Milk 50% is available now. Stock is limited and I stop shipping in July. New inventory won't arrive until September.

— Dima

Cacaosuyo — Piura Milk 50% Overall Best Milk Chocolate, ICA World Final 2015 & 2021–22 Origin: Piura, Peru Cacao: Piura Blanco Ingredients: cacao, whole milk powder, sugar, cacao butter, Peruvian jungle vanilla

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