An event featuring a man with a fascinating story to tell, set in the Cocoa and Chocolate Cluster: Claudio Corallo, a businessman who – uniquely suitable for this Cluster – grows Cocoa and makes Chocolate in the same place, in the São Tomé and Príncipe archipelago.
He talked to Expo Milano 2015 visitors about cocoa and the importance of quality-based production.
An emigrant whose success has grown from coffee and cocoa
Corallo brought with him over 40 years of professional experience, firstly in the coffee plantations of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then – since the 1990s – in São Tomé and Príncipe, where he cultivates cocoa trees.
Thanks to scrupulous controls of every phase from planting cocoa trees to selling chocolate, Corallo’s production is recognized internationally for the purity of its end product.
“Cocoa is produced in the tropics in the shadow of tall trees, not in Europe!”, emphasized the entrepreneur with a smile.
“Industrially, cocoa is always divided into one part powder and another part cocoa butter. But I don’t separate the two, I grind the whole cocoa bean.” Corallo described how he created a laboratory in order to understand the causes of cocoa defects, such as when it is bitter, which is not a typical cocoa characteristic.
And how he tries to “manipulate the cocoa as little as possible, in order to maintain the fruit’s flavor.”
Cocoa and Chocolate tasting in the Cluster
The event continued with a tasting event for Expo Milano 2015 visitors, featuring different kinds of chocolate, including pure toasted cocoa bean, to be de-shelled to taste the authentic flavor of untreated cocoa. “You can’t make good chocolate with bad cocoa: the ingredients are fundamental”, concluded the Italian entrepreneur.
The Cocoa and Chocolate Cluster plays host to six countries, all of whom have different ways of illustrating cocoa and its properties… namely Cuba, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, São Tomé and Príncipe, Gabon and Ghana
