Toasted Oat Milk 60% Oat Milk Chocolate Bar

The cacao beans for this chocolate were grown under the canopy of Sierra Leone’s Gola Rainforest National Park. Various charities, including RSPB, have been working with local farmers to grow the cocoa in harmony with the park rather than drive deforestation. Chocolarder has added toasted whole oats to the cocoa beans and sugar to replicate the creaminess without using dairy.The Gola Forest is one of only two national parks in Sierra Leone, referred to as the ‘green diamond of the nation’. A remnant of the Upper Guinean Tropical Rainforest, it is home to over 330 bird species, of which 14 now face global extinction. The rainforest is home to many endangered species including forest elephants, pygmy hippos and chimpanzees.The Gola Rainforest project is providing a livelihood and income for farmers around the national park while helping them to protect the rainforest from deforestation. Growing cocoa isn’t an easy task, and harvesting the pods can only be done by hand when grown under the canopy of the rainforest, hence the destruction of nearly all of Ghana’s rainforest when they opted for easy harvesting, leaving devastation.The project has been supporting farmers to harvest, ferment and dry their cocoa beans to the best quality to yield higher prices from chocolate makers around the world.About the BrandChocolarder was formed in 2012 by pastry chef Mike. He began experimenting happily in his own kitchen, making small batches from raw beans and getting intimate with the processes of roasting, grinding and alchemizing to produce fine chocolate from scratch.  It wasn't long before Mike started making his chocolate full time, and today his chocolate is sold all over the world and used by Michelin star chefs.Chocolarder is still producing fine quality, stone ground chocolate using organic beans imported from single estate, family run plantations in Venezuela, Java, Madagascar, Peru and the Dominican Republic. It sources directly from the farmers themselves, and by establishing this direct channel from the farm to the kitchen, it can be picky about the quality of the beans and be sure that the money it pays is going to those who do the real work. Having found reputable growers producing high quality beans, Chocolarder commits to purchasing its harvest always for above the market prices.Chocolarder is still one of the only small batch bean-to-bar chocolate makers in this country.