Cocoa Asante founder Ella Livingston spends her days crafting the kind of decadent treats she hopes make her patrons feel dropped in the lap of luxury.
After sliding open a thin black box containing bourbon pecan bonbons, or removing the blue foil wrap around a milk chocolate bar, and biting into the confection, Livingston wants people to feel special.
“Cocoa Asante is all about the experience,” she says. “We want you to feel bougee and luxurious when you see the packaging. And when you try the chocolate, we want you to say, ‘Gol-LEE, this is good!’”
Good chocolate isn’t easy, says Livingston, who launched Cocoa Asante in Chattanooga in 2018. To guarantee a quality product, she’s selective when it comes to ingredients, many of which she sources from as close to Cocoa Asante’s home in the city’s Business Development Center as possible.
Livingston orders bourbon from the Black-owned Majesty Bourbon in Georgia, for example, and pecans from the woman-owned Seahorse Snacks, which is based in the Scenic City.
She acquires the cocoa, however, from half the world away.
Although Livingston, 29, grew up in the U.S., she was born in the African nation of Ghana, where many of her family members live and grow cacao.
Cacao (pronounced “ka-kow”) is the raw, unroasted bean, Livingston explains, while the finished product is called cocoa. Ghana produces about 45% of the world’s cacao, making it the second largest producer of the bean, according to a 2021 article on GhanaWeb. (Ghana’s neighbor, Ivory Coast, is the top producer.)
The maternal side of Livingston’s family owns several plots of land totaling about 700 acres, most of which it allocates to growing cacao.
“The foliage is the richest shade of green I’ve seen and the soil has a beautiful reddish tint,” Livingston recalls from a visit to her family’s farm in the town of Bompata in 2016.
Although Livingston wants to use the cacao her family produces, Cocoa Asante is not yet able to process the raw bean, so she purchases cocoa from a European company that sources its beans from Ghana.
She intends to change this as she grows Cocoa Asante, although the investment won’t be cheap.
“One of our first goals is to scale the business to the point where we can buy bean-to-bar equipment, which will allow us to process cacao beans all the way to the end product,” she explains. “The last quote I received was $160,000.”
Once Cocoa Asante has the necessary equipment and is using the beans Livingston’s family cultivates, it will be one of the few chocolate makers in the world using cacao from its own farms, she says.
“There are companies that make single origin chocolate, which is great, but it doesn’t come from their own farms.”
Although Livingston is currently selling her chocolate online at cocoaasante.com and through a handful of local shops and markets, her plans – or rather, dreams – include expanding Cocoa Asante’s operations to her home county.
“Manufacturing is often done in European countries or here in the U.S, but I want to take it to Ghana so my home country is not just exporting cacao at a cheap price but is adding value to its raw resource,” Livingston explains.
This will place Livingston on the front lines of an effort in the African nation to stop selling raw materials to trade partners. According to the GhanaWed piece, which is titled “Why Ghana will no longer sell cocoa to Switzerland,” the country no longer wants to be dependent on the export of cacao but intends to produce more chocolate within its borders.
Government officials in Ghana say this movement toward “value addition” will help to alleviate poverty in the country, states GhanaWeb. Livingston agrees and says her family is among many cacao farmers who aren’t receiving a fair price for their crops.
“My cousin manages our farms and has to work a second full-time job to make ends meet. I’m proud Ghana is making a stand. We’re not going to allow ourselves to be exploited anymore.”
Before Livingston takes Cocoa Asante to Africa, she intends to first grow it locally. This includes opening a retail location she hopes will attract not only Chattanoogans but also customers from out of town.
And, like opening a box of her cinnamon S’more bonbons, she wants the experience to be stunning.
“I want you to feel like you’re enjoying a self-care day,” she laughs. “And I want people to be able to see how we make the chocolate and learn about what we’re doing as a company to change the inequities in the cacao industry.”
Although Livingston’s family are old hands at growing cacao, she’s not a born chocolatier. Rather, she was a math teacher before she started her own business.
Her parents emigrated to the U.S. when she was 3 years old, and she moved to Chattanooga in 2015 to participate in the Public Education Foundation’s Project Inspire program, which enabled her to earn a master’s degree while teaching in a local high-needs school.
The inspiration for Cocoa Asante was a Nama chocolate (a blend of melted cacao and fresh cream) Livingston tried while studying in Japan.
“It was so delicious, I was shocked,” Livingston remembers. “Up until then, my only experience with so-called ‘good chocolate’ was Lindor. I was by no means a chocoholic, but I’d travel two hours by train and pay about $20 for one small box. It was that good.
“I wanted to bring that experience to customers here.”
Livingston taught in Hamilton County for six years before leaving the profession to devote herself to Cocoa Asante. Her mission is now much bigger than she originally envisioned.
“As I was growing up, my mom always told me, ‘We grow cacao in our family,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever,’” Livingston says. “It didn’t matter to me because we were here. Little did I know how important it would become to me later on.”