Farm to Bar in the Amazon: Inside Justin Alvo's Ecuadorian Cacao Harvest

YouTube creator Justin Alvo, who runs a cacao farm in Ecuador’s Amazon region, just posted a full pod-to-bar walkthrough that’s worth a watch for anyone curious what “bean to bar” actually looks like before the marketing language kicks in.

The video opens on his own farm, where he harvests a cacao pod straight off the tree and cracks it open to show the fresh beans, still wrapped in their white, slightly sweet pulp, sometimes called the “vanilla ice cream bean” for its flavor before fermentation. He walks through how ripeness is judged by pod color, shifting from deep maroon to a bright red before harvest.

From there the beans go through a roughly week-long fermentation in a dark, enclosed space, followed by several more days of sun drying, the stage where the beans shift from purple to the dark brown most people associate with cacao. Alvo is upfront that this part isn’t intuitive. He initially tried skipping fermentation entirely before doing more research and correcting course.

The second half of the video moves to a local chocolate-making operation he calls Sukuita, run out of a friend’s home, where the dried beans are roasted, hand-peeled, and ground using a traditional stone grinder. He’s careful to point out what’s not going into the final bar: no refined sugar, no vegetable oil or soy oil standing in for cocoa butter, just roasted cacao, natural cane sugar, and pure cacao butter, conched for about eight hours before molding. The finished bar, mixed with dried cranberries, gets a snap test and a family taste test, with his dad rating it a 10 out of 10.

It’s a clear, unpolished look at the actual labor and time behind a bar of chocolate, useful viewing for anyone in the bean-to-bar space who wants to point people toward what “single origin” and “farm to table” mean in practice rather than as packaging copy.