The Sweet Spot

Words by Sara Mulcahy

In 2008, about 40 local landowners attended a meeting at the now-defunct Mossman Sugar Mill to talk about chocolate.

Spearheaded by Cadbury Australia, a consortium called the Northern Australia Cacao Development Alliance (NADCA) was excited to share its findings about the prospect of growing cacao in Far North Queensland. After eight years pouring money into feasibility studies and economic modelling, this meeting was the next step: to target local cane growers — who’d just experienced five years of rock-bottom prices and were looking to diversify.

Cacao is a fussy crop. It only grows successfully in a band about 17 degrees north and south of the Equator. About 70 per cent of the world's beans come from four West African countries: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon.

This means the global supply is vulnerable to local conditions there, such as extreme weather, supply chain disruptions and labour shortages. So when trials in the early Noughties revealed pockets of rainforest around Cairns to be the perfect place for a chocolate enterprise to thrive, hopes were high.

The efforts of the NADCA ultimately came to nothing. Cacao is a laborious crop to grow and harvest, and because we pay our workers a living wage, Australia simply couldn’t compete on price. But some farmers, encouraged by hefty government incentives, were already convinced of its potential — if only on a small scale.

Around 20 to 30 hectares of boutique plantations now operate along the Coral Coast between Innisfail and Cape Tribulation. Among them are Jenny and Darryl Kirk, who planted 1800 trinitario trees over eight acres in Shannonvale, about 15 minutes north of Port Douglas.

It started as a hobby farm. In the beginning, the couple tended the trees and sold the cacao pods to the Daintree Estates cooperative, which launched Australia's first 100% commercially grown and manufactured single-origin chocolate back in 2011. But they always had a dream to do their own thing.

“Darryl studied as a pastry chef, and he’s always had this little sneaky passion to make his own chocolate,” says Jenny. “So about five years ago, we started thinking about how we could diversify the farm and do something here for ourselves.”

Jenny had the idea to run cacao farm tours to educate people on tree-to-bar, “because people have no idea the work that goes into making chocolate unless someone starts sharing and teaching them”.

The Australian Chocolate Farm opened its doors as a chocolate shop, café and tour operator in June 2023. Since then, the price of cacao beans worldwide quadrupled due to severe droughts in West Africa, plus the catastrophic effects of Cyclone Jasper on our own local growers.

Even though the cocoa commodity price has come down a bit since then, prices are still high at the retail end because chocolate companies buy their supplies well in advance.

Almost every day, the Kirks are asked why they’re not scaling up to take advantage of the boom, planting more trees, and selling their beans on the open market.

“I think the reason we're still happy with what we're doing is that this is our dream,” says Jenny. “We've got the business up and running. We're successful enough. The plan was never to open 365 days a year and employ managers to share the load. We're not interested in building an empire for millions of dollars. Our vision here is to control our workload. And we seem to have made a success of it, for us.”

Every single bean grown and harvested at the Australian Chocolate Farm is made into chocolate on the premises and sold here in the shop.

“Darryl's made 500 kilos of chocolate in the past couple of months,” says Jenny. “And it all goes. He's here every morning, chasing his tail, making more chocolate for people walking in the door.”

Meanwhile, tour-goers are taken behind the scenes into the plantation to see the cacao growing, and learn about the process of making bean-to-bar chocolate from fermenting and winnowing to cracking and conching. But it’s perhaps the results on the tasting plate — including chocolate flavoured with native wattleseed, and the award-winning lemon myrtle — that linger longest in the memory.

“A family came in last week, and the man said to me, ‘Is this the famous tasting plate?’” Jenny tells. “And I said, ‘Oh, is it famous?’ I had no idea.”

Bean to bar

Here’s where you can find locally grown and made chocolate in and around Port Douglas.

The Australian Chocolate Farm

What: Café, shop and guided farm tours.

Where: 78 Mountainview Drive, Shannonvale

Open: Wednesday to Saturday, 9am to 4pm
The Far North Queensland Chocolate Company

What: Vegan, gluten-free, locally grown chocolate and ice-cream.

Where: Port Douglas Markets, Market Park

Open: Every Sunday, 8am to 1.30pm
Coffee Works

What: Handcrafted chocolates, locally roasted coffee and more.

Where: 34 Macrossan Street

Open: Daily, 10am to 4pm