Hi everyone, I recently ran across this gem of a website and I was hoping for a bit of guidance.

First things first. I live in the bay area, near San Francisco California. When I was growing up I lived in Ecuador as an exchange student. My host brother and I are started a Cacao farm, about 16 hectares of Nacional.

I'm in the phase of trying to learn as much about this whole process as possible, I've been scouring the forums looking where people are sourcing their beans and such. So with that in mind; where do you all buy your raw materials?

I've run across a couple of websites but I don't know if these are the suppliers that people use.

http://www.cocoasupply.com

http://www.cacao-beans.com/

http://www.icamprofessionale.it/TMP_prodottiLista.php?&l=ENG&sc=3

http://www.cocoapodshop.com/products/Cocoa-Beans-%28450g-portion%29.html

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=cacao&x=0&y=0

who knew you could buy this stuff on amazon?

http://www.chocosphere.com/

I keep seeing posts saying they do wholesale sales of raw materials. Couldn't find anything on their website but thought I would them forcompletenesssake .

http://chocolatealchemy2.myshopify.com/products/peruvian-cocoa-ft-org-2011

http://www.ebay.com

this market doesn't seem to be thriving. No bids on anything that I saw.

I've listed all the websites I found. I didn't list everyone's individual contact information that I ran across as I would have quickly gotten bogged down. So this iseverything I've found going through every single post in this forum as well as using google. I'm sure I missed some.

Question 2.

Would you like to be able to have beans fermented to your specifications?

Question 3.

How important is having organic certification, fair trade, rain forest alliance to you? I guess what I'm really asking is what do you look for when you buy your raw materials?

Thanks everyone. Over the next 6 weeks I'll try and get some pictures up of what we are doing.

Sincerely,

Ethan