How Our Calcium Dark Chocolate is Made

Ah, chocolate – a sweet treat that most people fall in love with after their first taste. If you’re worried about giving it up entirely following weight loss surgery, don’t be! ProCare Health offers calcium dark chocolate bars that are made from cacao, Trucal® calcium, and vitamin D. Trucal® offers a balanced profile of essential minerals and antioxidants, while vitamin D helps by regulating the calcium you intake. But why does it matter that we use cacao chocolate? You can find out more by reading about how our calcium dark chocolate is made.

Straight From Cacao Beans

Close your eyes for a brief moment and think about where chocolate comes from. Do you picture it in any other form than that of a solid bar, chip, or liquid syrup? Surprisingly enough, it comes from a bean! Theobroma cacao is a particular kind of tree that thrives in warm weather and produces multiple pods of cacao beans. Raw cacao contains nearly four times the antioxidants (twenty times more than blueberries) than that of your average dark chocolate and is also a good source of magnesium. Think they taste just like chocolate that you’d find in the store? Cacao beans are actually quite bitter when initially hand-picked.

Hand-Picked by Farmers

Speaking of hand-picking, that’s how farmers harvest our cacao beans. This process carefully takes place around two times a year so that the tree can continue producing more beans in the future. After picking them, the farmers crack their shells and break them in half. Eight days’ worth of fermentation immediately follows the harvest to prevent the bean from growing back into a tree. After that, they need to be set out for 7 more days to dry in the sun. The farmers stay close by to adjust the beans as needed to keep mold away. Fifteen days later, the cacao beans are ready to be cleaned, roasted at low temperatures, and shelled down to the nibs.

Tempered to Perfection

Our chocolate maker uses three main ingredients in our chocolate – cacao, sugar, and cocoa butter. By utilizing raw, non-processed ingredients, there are no preservatives, GMOs, artificial sweeteners, sugar alcohols, or additives in ProCare Health’s calcium dark chocolate bars. Once everything has been blended together, the mixture is tempered to perfection. This allows the ingredients to crystalize and provides that chocolaty consistency you’ve come to know and love.

Who is Our Chocolate Maker?

ProCare Health partners with Davis Chocolates in order to produce our calcium dark chocolate bars. It’s our goal to also produce them in the most sustainable way possible. Davis Chocolates uses only the best cacao beans and works closely with farmers in Ecuador. Countries like Ecuador provide beans that are organic (zero pesticides, preservatives, artificial colors, or GMOs) and Fair Trade Certified™. This means that the farmers are paid fairly for their product.

Ethical and Sustainable Chocolate Making

Thanks to its extraordinary popularity, chocolate is a much sought-after treat. This unfortunately means that some will stop at nothing to mass farm cacao beans, resulting in the destruction of smaller farms. Deforestation is another consequence of mass farming. That’s why Davis Chocolates constantly collaborates with the Rainforest Alliance, an international nonprofit organization working at the intersection of business, agriculture, and forests to make responsible business the new normal.

More on Our Dark Chocolate

If you really want to fall in love with ProCare Health’s delicious calcium dark chocolate bars, read our previous post to get even more insight on how the magnesium, calcium, vitamin D, antioxidants, iron, and fiber it offers can play a part in your daily routine. Did we mention that the Trucal® included in our chocolate does not require stomach acid for absorption, is non-constipating, does not increase the risk for kidney stones, and you don’t have to consume food with it? Now that you’ve done your homework, try our calcium dark chocolate bars for yourself. These won’t be around much longer, though! They are seasonal and will be going out-of-stock soon – returning again in the fall.