Figa Foods and the chocolate that is not chocolate

Ariel is from New York. Ronny is from São Paulo. They met around a question: why don't Americans know about Brazilian superfoods? They built Figa Foods around an answer most chocolatiers have never tasted. A conversation about cupuaçu, the cocoa crisis, and a bar with three ingredients on the back.

There is a fruit native to the Amazon basin that has been eaten in Brazil for several thousand years, and almost nowhere else. Its outer shell is hard and brown. Its flesh is creamy and tart, with a tropical note that some people describe as a cross between pineapple and chocolate. Its seeds, when fermented and roasted in the manner that cocoa beans are fermented and roasted, produce something that looks and behaves like chocolate. It does not taste like chocolate, exactly. It tastes like its own thing.

The fruit is called cupuaçu, pronounced coo-poo-ah-soo. It is, botanically, a close cousin of cocoa — both belong to the genus Theobroma, which means "food of the gods" in Greek. Cocoa is Theobroma cacao. Cupuaçu is Theobroma grandiflorum. They grow in the same forests. They are processed similarly. One of them is the foundation of a global industry valued at over one hundred billion dollars. The other one, until recently, almost no one outside Brazil had heard of.

Figa Foods is the work of two people who wondered why.

Ariel and Ronny

Ariel is from New York. Ronny is from São Paulo. They met, and over time, found themselves returning to the same conversation on every trip they took together to Brazil. The food was extraordinary. The fruits, in particular, were unlike anything available in American supermarkets. Cupuaçu, açaí, guaraná, jabuticaba — a long list of native ingredients that had nourished Brazilians for generations and that the rest of the world, somehow, had never met.

The question they kept asking was the obvious one. Why don't Americans know about all these amazing superfoods?

The answer, as they began to investigate, was partly logistical. Many of these fruits do not travel well in their fresh form. Their seasons are short. Their supply chains are local. The infrastructure that delivers strawberries from California to a grocery store in Ohio does not exist for cupuaçu. And the international food industry, having built its global cocoa supply on a small number of equatorial growing regions, had no commercial reason to develop alternatives.

What changed the calculation was the cocoa crisis.

The cocoa problem

The price of cocoa has roughly tripled since 2023. The reasons are convergent and largely permanent. West Africa, where over sixty percent of the world's cocoa is grown, has been hit simultaneously by climate disruption, by a cacao swollen-shoot virus that is destroying mature trees, by aging farms that have not been replanted for a generation, and by the deforestation that follows attempts to plant new ones. The result is the highest cocoa prices in recorded history, and a global chocolate industry that is, for the first time in fifty years, openly worried about its supply chain.

For Ariel and Ronny, this was context. Cupuaçu was not a workaround invented to solve the cocoa problem. It was something Brazilians had been eating for several thousand years, made from a tree that grows in regenerative agroforestry systems alongside cocoa, bananas, açaí, and the layers of a healthy tropical forest. The forest is the agriculture. The agriculture is the forest. The cocoa problem made the case for cupuaçu commercially urgent, but cupuaçu itself was already there, waiting.

The partnership that made Figa possible came together around this idea. Luisa Abram, one of the most respected chocolate makers in Brazil, brought decades of experience working with native Amazonian cocoa varieties. Ariel and Ronny brought the brand, the New York connection, the willingness to introduce something new to a market that had not asked for it.

Three ingredients

The Figa bar is made from cupuaçu, dates, and cocoa butter. That is the entire ingredient list. There are three flavors. The Pure bar is the base — creamy, buttery, slightly tropical, with no additions. The Salty bar adds a small amount of sea salt. The Fruity bar adds real freeze-dried fruit. That is all.

What is not in the bar is, for most chocolate, equally notable. There is no lecithin. There is no added sugar. There is no milk powder or milk fat. There is no natural flavor. There is no vanillin or synthetic vanilla. There is no emulsifier. The bar holds together because cupuaçu seeds are naturally rich in fat — the creaminess is the seed, not an additive. A small amount of cocoa butter gives the bar its snap. It is sweet because dates are sweet. It tastes like cupuaçu because it is, mostly, cupuaçu.

Compare that, for a moment, to a typical commercial milk chocolate bar. The ingredient list usually runs to ten or twelve items: sugar, milk, cocoa butter, chocolate, soy lecithin, natural flavor, sometimes PGPR (an emulsifier), sometimes vanillin, sometimes a stabilizer. Each addition does something — texture, shelf stability, mouthfeel, cost reduction. Each addition also moves the bar incrementally further from the cocoa bean it started as. By the time the bar reaches the consumer, the bean is perhaps thirty or forty percent of the recipe.

In Figa, cupuaçu is most of the recipe. The other two ingredients are present because they are necessary, not because they are convenient.

The creaminess comes from the seed, not an additive. It is sweet because dates are sweet. It tastes like cupuaçu because it is, mostly, cupuaçu.

The agroforestry case

The cupuaçu in a Figa bar comes from regenerative farms in Brazil, where the tree is grown not in plantation rows but as part of a multilayered tropical forest. Cacao grows underneath taller trees. Cupuaçu grows nearby. Açaí palms stand in clearings. Bananas occupy the middle canopy. The result is an agricultural system that looks more like a forest than a farm.

This is the opposite of the dominant model for global cocoa. Most West African cocoa is grown in cleared plantations, often on land that was forest a generation ago, often without the shade trees that the cacao plant prefers. The model is high-yield, short-term, and ecologically extractive. The Brazilian agroforestry model is lower-yield per acre, longer-cycle, and ecologically supportive. It also produces a more flavorful product, because the trees are healthier and the harvest is more selective.

A short conversation with the founders

Watch a 60-second introduction to Figa Foods on TikTok.

Where to find Figa

Figa Foods is carried at Loot Grocery in West Palm Beach. The brand is online at figafoods.com, and on Instagram and TikTok at @figafoods.

If you have never tried cupuaçu in any form, the bar is the most accessible introduction. In Brazil, fazer figa is a gesture that means to bring good luck. The brand name comes from there. The luck, in the end, is for the fruit.