Nacional (cocoa bean)

History

The genetic history of Ecuador’s Nacional cocoa bean stretches back roughly 5,500 years, linking it to the earliest cacao trees ever domesticated by people. In the 1700s and 1800s, European chocolatiers considered Nacional the world’s most desirable cacao, thanks to its floral scent and intricate taste. This was Ecuador’s golden age of cacao. That era collapsed in 1916 when witches’ broom disease swept through the country’s Nacional trees.

Starting in the 1930s, growers introduced genetic material from foreign cacao varieties, which led to widespread crossbreeding. By the early 2000s, most experts assumed that no pure Nacional trees remained. Today, truly pure Nacional specimens are still very scarce, since nearly all surviving trees have been hybridized with other types. In 2009, Ecuador’s agricultural research institute, INIAP, gathered DNA samples from cacao trees across the country.

Out of 11,000 samples tested, only six trees—just 0.05 percent of those analyzed—proved to be 100 percent genetically pure Nacional. Then, in 2013, To’ak Chocolate discovered groves of 100- to 120-year-old cacao trees in the Piedra de Plata valley, a mountainous part of the Arriba cacao-growing region in Manabi province. With help from the Heirloom Cacao Preservation fund, INIAP director Freddy Amores, and USDA-ARS scientist Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, DNA tests were run on a small group of these trees.

Of the sixteen mature trees examined, nine were confirmed as genetically pure Nacional. That discovery raised the total number of DNA-verified pure Nacional trees in Ecuador to fifteen.