My dad spent most of his career as an intellectual property lawyer. My mom is an art broker. They are, on paper, not people you'd expect to find running a cacao farm in the middle of Laguna — sweaty, in rubber boots, covered in what I can only assume is a combination of soil and optimism.
And yet — for as long as I can remember they had this dream, quiet and persistent and the kind that gets expensive if you encourage it, of retiring on a farm. Not a cute little herb garden. A real farm, with land and dogs and turkeys and things growing out of the ground. Before COVID, they were already doing reconnaissance — scouting plots, taking drives out of Manila on weekends, doing the math on what it would cost to just leave.
Then COVID happened, and the math got easier.
They found their land in Limao, a tiny barangay in Laguna, a couple of hours south of the city. It had been a banana plantation. The first structures they built were shipping containers, which we called pods — my parents called this cozy, which tells you everything you need to know about them. They commuted for a while, city to farm, farm to city. Then the farm started winning. Then it won. Nobody announced this officially. It just became true.
My dad planted cacao trees. Coffee trees too. He had a plan.
It was not good. Nobody said this. We all said things like "interesting" and "you can really taste the cacao" which, in the vocabulary of polite food feedback, means the same thing as not good. My dad knew. We knew he knew. He went back to the drawing board.
I should mention — and my parents will either find this funny or be mildly annoyed that I included it, but I think it's important context — that it was only after they had already moved onto the farm, already planted the trees, already started making chocolate, and already wound down most of my dad's law practice, that I happened to overhear a conversation in the kitchen about how, exactly, the chocolate business was supposed to make money. In a concrete, sustainable, realistic way. This is the kind of detail that maybe ideally gets worked out a little earlier in the process, but here we are, and the chocolate is delicious.
We used five pods. Put the seeds on a tray for five days — no temperature control, no draining, didn't know what we were doing. The batch was so small we roasted them in a toaster and ground them in a blender. We managed to make a crude hot chocolate. Then I tried pouring some into an ice cube tray to make something solid. I didn't know the formulation for sugar — it was so bitter I think I threw it out. Your mom bought a bonbon mold and I tried that too. It was gritty. It wasn't anything recognizable as chocolate. You were basically eating tablea — that's something you buy in the market and boil into a drink. You don't eat it. We didn't know that.
That was a few years ago. Since then: proper equipment, real fermentation, a roasting process he's spent years dialing in. He and my mom flew to Taiwan to visit artisan chocolate makers and get actual feedback from people who were allowed to be honest. They ran blind tastings. They iterated — loosely, my mom would say, because my dad did not tend to do any of this particularly scientifically. He would land on something that tasted good and not have written down exactly what he did to get there. Weights, temperatures, ratios: things you record, in my mom's view. Things you remember, or figure out again, in my dad's. This is also, I think, a reasonable explanation for why the R&D took as long as it did.
Her other theory — stated with equal frequency — is that none of this matters, because he just got lucky. The first real chocolate he made was already exceptional. Complex, delicious, the kind of thing that makes you slow down mid-bite — and this from something he'd just poured flat onto a food-safe plastic sheet and broken into shards, because proper molds were apparently a later development. Right out of the gate. Which, if you know my dad, will surprise you exactly as much as it surprised my mom: not at all, and also completely.
The chocolate that came out the other side is — and I'm aware I'm not objective here, but I've also eaten a lot of chocolate in my life — genuinely delicious. Dark, complex, two ingredients: cacao from their farm in Laguna and sugar, traceable to specific trees and harvests.
They're calling it Halimao. It's a play on halimaw (beast, in Filipino) and Limao, the village where the farm is. This is exactly the kind of wordplay my dad thinks is very clever, and I mean that with the full complexity of someone who shares half his genes.
I visited the farm for the first time after the trees had really grown in, and the thing that got me — more than I expected — was how alive it felt. Not "tropical paradise" alive, which is a phrase that belongs on a resort brochure. Actually alive. Hot and humid and buggy and real, the sun not warming you so much as claiming you, the kind of heat that feels less like a hug and more like your mother grabbing your face with both hands. You walk through it and feel like you wandered into the part of the world where everything started.
That's where this chocolate comes from.
Here's what I find genuinely rare about it: my dad's hands are in every single step. He planted the trees. He weeded around them for years while he waited. He harvests the cacao pods, ferments the beans, dries them, roasts them, runs them through the melanger. He tempers the chocolate himself. And then he pours it — into molds, on the counter of the kitchen where my family also makes dinner, which my mom calls the commissary, because she is an optimist and also because the kitchen is genuinely large and impressive, but it is still the same counter. From the tree in the ground in Limao to the bar in your hand, the number of people involved is, depending on how you count, somewhere between one and a few. Most chocolate — even very good artisan chocolate — has passed through so many hands by the time it reaches you that "traceability" is a marketing word, not a literal fact. Here it is a literal fact, and that person is my dad.
So: we're starting small. A soft launch — limited tasting sets, people we know, the kind of beginning where you can still text us if something's wrong with your order. Everyone who orders is in what we're calling the Halimao Circle: first to know about new batches, new variants, seasonal releases, and whatever else we come up with down the line.
We're at the beginning of this. The first tasting sets are ready.
If you're reading this, you're part of the Halimao Circle — first to hear about new tasting sets, new variants, seasonal releases, and what's happening on the farm. More on what that means soon.
(We have over twenty dogs on the farm. This will definitely come up again.)
Want to forward this to someone who should be on the list? Sign up here.
More soon. The trees are doing well.
