Up close with homegrown fine chocolate brand, Auro
You never know what you’re going to get, as Forrest Gump said. Choco-entrepreneur Mark Ocampo details this truth in his venture, Auro
Now, for most cacao farmers, life is a box of chocolates. Auro, the artisanal Filipino-made chocolates that Mark Ocampo and Kelly Go created, is not just the most decadent thing on the lips of culinary connoisseurs and industry heavyweights; it is also the sustaining force behind nearly 2,000 farmers in Davao.
Auro takes its name from the chemical symbol for gold—au—and the phonetics of the same in Spanish, “oro.” The precious element is strewn into the identity and the story of this bean-to-bar brand. It comes as no surprise that gold plays a central role in the visual branding, but not many know that Mark himself designed the overall look and feel. “Auro summates everything I was hoping to do: help people, eat [of course], and design!”
It is in eating that Mark and Kelly conceptualised their business in 2010. When they met in Chicago during their college years—the Art Institute of Chicago for the branding expert that is Mark, and the University of Chicago for Kelly, before she moved to Paris to study at Le Cordon Bleu—they chanced upon an American chocolate that had been produced using Philippine cacao beans. The seed of Auro had been planted, but it wouldn’t flourish until much later.
It was 2015 when the work began. “We needed to learn everything we could about the cocoa bean,” shares Mark, who set out with Kelly to discover what it would take to make a world-class chocolate brand in Germany.
Today, Auro is driven by a triumvirate of efforts: cacao farmers from Davao, an expansive factory in Laguna, and stateof-the-art equipment from Europe. “We invested in German and Italian machinery, the same ones that the international chocolate brands use, to elevate the standard of quality,” says Mark, “Ensuring that our products are competitive in the global market.”
These products have purposed Auro for the best of the culinary world. Auro comes as cooking chocolate: couverture coins and blocks, which are used in baking; cacao nibs, which can be ingredients for other recipes or taken as snacks on their own; and, cacao mass, which are finelyground nibs that can intensify the flavour of chocolate fare and creations.
Auro’s Fine Chocolate Bars, on the other hand, make up the high-quality chocolate they have sought to create. From 42% milk chocolate up to 77% dark chocolate, some variants of the Fine Chocolate Bars also contain nibs, even white chocolate and roasted cashew nuts. The 2016 Reserve Collection, for its part, is an ode to Mindanao: Pacquibato, Saloy, and South Cotabato representing regions of the south where the cacao thrives.
Finally, at the heart of the brand, Mark details how Auro helps him achieve his desire to help people. In the United States, Mark and Kelly did not only want to return to their homeland to start a business, they also wanted to make a contribution. “Sometimes people don’t make the connection with chocolate being the product of a fruit,” Mark says, “And like any fruit, it’s susceptible to the environment and how it is grown. From there we realised that there was so much more to making chocolate than we thought.”
Clearly, the choco-entrepreneurs were culling from business knowledge they themselves had gathered since beginning on this path. Among their biggest obstacles— and there are many: the lack of expertise and education on chocolate-making being just one of them, and the gargantuan challenge of fair wage amongst farmers another—mark cites launching when the time was right as an important lesson. “We’ve been around for about three years but we only launched in May 2017 because we wanted to make sure to start off right,” he says.
Indeed, since launching, Auro has earned the respect of the public and the industry, as well as the goodwill of the farmers that they work with. “This year we have some masterclasses with excellent international chocolatiers, more collaborations with different institutions, and exciting pop-ups around the world,” shares Mark. “We’re actually also opening up our factory to tours so that people can learn and appreciate the whole process of making chocolate from the cocoa bean.” In early January, this is exactly what they did, proving the weight in gold of this box of chocolates.
Auro has earned the respect of the public And the industry, As well As the goodwill of the farmers that they work with