[This is the third in an ongoing series on young Catholics from the Diocese who demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit in support of their ministries — this time in South America.]
LIMA, Peru Chocolate surely makes the world go ’round — putting smiles on people’s faces, soothing their every “sweet tooth” and melting hearts this past Valentine’s Day. But Amanda Jo Wildey and her chocolate shop in the capital city of Peru are banking on the decadent delight also going a long way toward helping save their corner of the world from the evils of cocaine trafficking.
In a small but profound way, “AJ” Wildey, a 2005 graduate of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (OLMC) School, Boonton, and a 2009 graduate of Morris Catholic High School, Denville, opened El Cacaotal in 2017. It sells the chocolate of Peruvian farmers, who are making the humane and life-saving choice of switching from growing and processing coca plants for cocaine to cacao plants for chocolate. Her store carries on a social justice mission to support the participating farmers and chocolate makers, so they can earn better incomes and increase their visibility in national and world markets; offer workshops for famers, who are interested in making chocolate; and educate the public about the rich diversity of Peruvian cacao and chocolate, she said.
“The store offers farmers a commercial outlet to sell their chocolate. They get a fair wage for their products and recognition for their efforts, their sacrifice and the time that they put in crafting their chocolates,” Wildey said. For decades, Peru has served as an active South American hub of cocaine trafficking. This has lured these often-poor farmers into growing coca plants that would ultimately be used for cocaine — a quicker and more lucrative, but also more dangerous, option than farming cacao for chocolate production. “Cacao offers farmers this idea of a way out,” she said.
Nestled in the trendy neighborhood of Barranco in Lima, El Cacaotal bills itself as a veritable “edible library of chocolate,” which displays a wide variety of the best chocolates from the farmers in Peru — from bean to bar. This is the result of Wildey’s partnership with “cacao hunters,” who always are searching for the finest product. The travel guide Lonely Planet calls the shop “a must for local chocoholics” and listed it on its top 10 “must-sees” in Lima.
“Ultimately, AJ weds a passion for chocolate with a love for people. She’s not only intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of the cacao market, but also she really knows its farmers — not as cogs in a co-op, but as people worthy of her best efforts,” states a recent story about Wildey in OLMC’s newsletter. “In this way, she beautifully embodies the lessons of OLMC, where students are immersed in the study of people who sharpen their extraordinary gifts and talents so that they may be used in service to others. She is a woman on a mission to make the world a better place through chocolate,” it states.
Wildey cites the example of her family as the foundation of her project’s “human-centric focus”: “Whether it was within the OLMC parish community or neighborhood, my parents modeled a commitment to lending a helping hand and making genuine person-to-person connections.”
The stirrings of Wildey’s sweet recipe for success started with a semester abroad, while a senior at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where she focused on anthropology and Latin American studies. That research, which included working on farms in the mountains, led to her conducting fieldwork in Peru from November 2011 and January 2013 to investigate how technological changes had impacted community relations in the rural Andean farming community of Coporaque. That research became part of her senior project and continued after she earned her bachelor’s degree, thanks to a grant from Rotary International, she said.
In 2014, Wildey moved to Lima to study for a master’s degree in anthropology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where she studied how growing cacao could improve the lives of farmers. She saw first-hand the well-meaning but failed attempt by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to create a farming cacao co-op to battle the drug trade and address the extreme poverty in the remote villages. USAID failed “to find buyers for the increased production it had stimulated” and “neglected to take into account the fluctuations of the global cacao market, leaving farmers with an overabundance of crops and no one to sell them to,” states OLMC’s newsletter, adding that “the agency’s insistence on geographically-based co-ops spelled disaster.”
Wildey realized that the co-op model did not provide a realistic solution in the village of Miguel Grau that she was studying — a place populated by people of diverse backgrounds and divided by racial and cultural tensions. In her research, she discovered that farmers had no fair market for their cacao, especially for those who were just starting to innovate their own chocolate products. So she decided to open El Cacaotal to give famers a place to sell their diverse chocolates.
The switch to growing cacao has eased some of the dangers and uncertainty that farmers had once faced while planting coca for cocaine production. The lure to cultivate coca was appealing, because it is more lucrative than cacao and takes only six months to grow, unlike cacao, which takes three years to sprout its first fruit. Cacao also requires more upkeep with pruning, watering and fertilizing and then fermenting the cacao beans after harvest. But the coca profits came with a high price — people constantly fearing for their lives, which was “draining,” Wildey said.
“A young man told me, ‘When you go to sell the coca, the dried leaves, you never know if when you make the transaction with the person, whether they are going to pull out a wallet and pay you or pull out a gun and shoot you,’ ” said Wildey, who finished her master’s degree with highest honors in 2016.
Ultimately, Wildey, who enjoys making product suggestions to her customers to help them find their perfect chocolate bar, considers chocolate “as all about sharing.”
“It’s a very personal experience of people coming into the shop. Our chocolate is so diverse in its flavors and its origins and its histories. It’s this tree that over thousands of years, has come to mean unity: a holy, sacred giver — not only of food substance, but also of ritual significance that cultures would build belief systems around. We can still have that, when we share chocolate and ask what kind of chocolate does a person like, where do the beans come from, who are the farmers behind it and what does it mean for them?”