The Chocolate Tasting Adventure
Taste where chocolate comes from.
A small-group tasting where you meet our chocolate the way it was meant to be met: slowly, side by side, and with the person who made it. Three single-origin bars from three regions of Peru, with no refined sugar, so there's nothing to hide behind.
Why should I go to this experience?
This is chocolate tasting at the source of the recipe. Your host is Jose Visconti, COO and the mind behind all Cacao Adventures products, including every bar you'll taste.
For over ten years, Jose has worked with indigenous communities and small family farms in Peru, learning from the people who carry generations of knowledge about cacao. He is a chocolate lover and a cacao scientist, and the best person to show you what a great bar really tastes like.
You'll leave knowing why a bar from the desert tastes nothing like one from the Amazon, and why a good dark chocolate doesn't need to be sweet to be satisfying.
Finally, taste the chocolate
Most chocolate is built to be sweet first and cacao second. Ours works the other way around. With no refined sugar in the mix, only coconut sugar, the cacao has nowhere to hide, and neither does its origin.
Desert, valley, or Amazon: every terroir leaves its own signature, and once you know how to taste for it, you can't unlearn it.
What you can expect from this experience
An invitation to explore chocolate through your senses. Whether you're a dark chocolate devotee or a milk chocolate loyalist, this tasting will change how you taste every bar from now on.
- How to taste chocolate like a pro: look, snap, smell, melt, finish
- How terroir shapes flavor, from the desert to the valley to the Amazon
- Why we sweeten only with coconut sugar, and what you can taste when refined sugar steps aside
- How to tell real single-origin chocolate from mass-market bars
- How different additions create unique experiences
Meet your host: Jose Visconti
Jose is a cacao scout. For over ten years, he's tracked down the wild strains of cacao in Peru, following leads that start in scientific journals and end in the country's most biodiverse, hard-to-reach corners.
He works backward from the research, combing published studies to pinpoint where native cacao still grows, then going there himself to find the farmers who've protected these strains for generations, often on instinct alone.
It started in 2014, when an NGO-funded project brought him into these communities. He saw farmers with exceptional genetics being overlooked simply because they were hard to reach — and matched that with research naming Peru a global hotspot for cacao biodiversity.
Once these alliances are forged, the real work begins. Jose partners with the small farmers to master cacao fermentation, drying, and sorting — the techniques that determine whether a bean reaches its full potential or falls short of it.
From the forest floor to his own lab, the process is exacting: every batch tested, refined, and prepared to a standard that the world's best chocolate makers can build on.
Now it's time for you to taste the results in a guided session with the Cacao Adventures co-founder, exploring the unique terroirs behind every bean.
Frequently asked questions
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Each Tasting Room session runs for 45 minutes.
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Sessions are intimate - a maximum of 8 guests per table.
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At our Carlsbad store: 5674 El Camino Real, Ste H, Carlsbad, California 92008.
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Free parking available on site.
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The experience costs $50.
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Not at all. The session is designed for curious first-timers as well as dedicated chocolate lovers. You don't need any tasting experience, and you don't need to love dark chocolate (yet).
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Sessions are by appointment only and subject to availability. We recommend booking early, as spots are limited and sessions fill quickly.
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The Cacao Tasting Adventure focuses on ceremonial cacao and how to prepare it. This one is all about chocolate bars: how origin, cacao percentage, and ingredients shape what you taste. Do both and you'll follow the whole journey from bean to bar.
