Seventy percent of the land on our bird sanctuary, Reserva Zorzal, is set aside to be forever wild. As the Dominican Republic’s first private preserve, we’re a model for other landowners working towards landscape-level conservation and greater access to global markets.

We strive to pick each cacao pod at its optimal ripeness, removing any diseased, damaged or over ripe fruit. The beans are then coaxed from their pods and brought to our Fermentorium where our master fermenter, Heriberto Paredes, nurtures the cacao through a process of natural fermentation and drying cycles to elicit the nuanced flavor profiles found in the high mountain rainforests of the Dominican Republic.

We are dedicated to elevating communities in the Dominican Republic. We do this by creating jobs in wildlife monitoring, offering education services and employment on Reserva Zorzal and Zorzal’s Fermentorium, boosting incomes with reforestation payments, and supporting our neighboring farms with best practices to garner higher prices for their product.