Sweet love

Nothing predisposed the Tarma engineer and the Montreal computer scientist to meet, much less to get into chocolate. The meeting was fortuitous, one autumn evening in 2007 in a café bar in Cusco. “ Quieres bailar ?” (do you want to dance?), Elfi dared. “Enchanted,” he replied, without understanding… She went back to her seat, embarrassed, crestfallen. But he came back to the charge, and since then, they have never taken their eyes off each other. A year later, Maxime took the big leap to Lima. And one more, Elfi also crossed the Americas.

She learned French in record time and earned an honors degree in industrial engineering from the École Polytechnique. He pocketed his MBA. The path was paved. They had good jobs, they traveled, they talked about one day doing a crazy project together, without limits. When they tell their story, they look at each other, in love.

“I thought I would do something that would keep me connected to Peru,” Elfi admits, nostalgic. “But it wasn’t clear. Engineering consulting? A transportation company?”

The Call of Cocoa

“It was Maxime who introduced me to chocolate,” she says with a laugh. “I was 24! In Peru, we don’t really eat it.”

So they taste. All kinds of tablets. "We ate them from all over the world!" One day, they come across a box of lozenges from the Alto el Sol plantation. "It's three hours from your house in Peru. Let's go!" announces the young man.

In 2014, the couple visited this community of cocoa producers in the eastern Andes. They quickly discovered that all the plants were bought by the United States and the manufacturer Barry Callebaut. "All that is sold," they told us. " If you want good ancestral native cocoa, there is still some left, but not much left." That was all it took to light the spark.

Doing business with love

Back in Montreal, the couple began their research. At the same time, Elfi lost her job; the company chose to subcontract in Indonesia and China. "This way of doing things made me bitter." But her husband, attentive to the wonderful synchronicity, did not hesitate to encourage her. "It's time to get started!" For these two professionals at heart, there are other ways of doing business, and all the signs converge. "That's why I love it," she shares with a broad smile.

2016. The cocoa fair in Lima. The first brick in the cogs. The young Peruvian woman seduces. As comfortable as a fish in water, she begins to make contacts. She joins the team of chocolatiers who go prospecting on the cocoa route. "Without having ever made a single bar of chocolate!", her husband trumpets cheerfully. "In Peru, to do business, you have to maintain real relationships of trust. And that's what we managed to do. I met the first cocoa producers with whom we were going to work. Seven years later, they became our friends."

Few chocolatiers can boast of doing business directly with growers. “Most say they do direct trade, but that’s not the case. In reality, brokers act as intermediaries. They offer good samples and then buy batches of several tons, of varying quality. They also often mix origins. In six years, we must have come across at most two or three chocolatiers on the plantations! Conversely, we go to our small producers twice a year. They reserve special micro-batches for us. We taste, we select our beans. We only know one other who does the same as us. Despite everything we hear, actually doing bean to bar is really very rare in the industry .”

Chocolate and medals

How do you tell a good bean from another? “You can smell it!” Elfi says, pointing to her nose. The physical aspect too, and the taste, of course. “But even at this stage, most people are looking for the chocolate of their childhood. So they find the beans too tart and they dry them out more or ferment them longer. It ends up tasting like yogurt! When I’m looking for something, I don’t have that point of reference. It has to be different, authentic. I accept the citrus bean from Piura. This cocoa will never be an Easter chocolate. I like the bean that is closest to its nature, with tasting notes of grapefruit, lime and pollen. Or the chuncho cocoa that grows in the altitudes of Macchu Pichu, with its notes of blueberry and blackcurrant and its floral flight of lily and lilac.” Elfi and Maxime have become fine connoisseurs.

They made their first tablets in their kitchen that year. Experimentation 101. Then they went to sell them at the Christmas market. A few weeks later, in January 2017, they founded the company Qantu .

"We thought it would be a good idea to send samples to an international competition, in order to get feedback. We didn't expect anything at all. In May, the results announced that we had won two gold medals and a silver medal with our first three tablets ever!"

They were on the right track. In a panic, they rented a space, ordered cocoa, bought more equipment to satisfy the orders that were pouring in from everywhere. “We had no real packaging, no premises, no website. We just had a small three-kilo grinder! In the space of a few months, we got organized. We were working fourteen hours a day.”

In 2018, the passionate entrepreneurs sent six bars back to the Academy of International Chocolate Award competition. “What stress this time,” Maxime admits. The results: five gold medals and one silver! The most decorated chocolatiers among the 1,200 samples from 45 countries. It was a given, they would go to London for the awards ceremony. The grand prize, the Golden Bean Award, would be revealed at that time. “We have two ties, but that’s good because they were made by the same chocolatier: Qantu!”

“That was a sign to us that we were doing things right, and we’re continuing on that path.” Qantu has points of sale here, in France and as far away as China, and nearly 150 in the United States. Several restaurateurs have also fallen in love with their products. They have employees, a new location, more equipment. They still do things by hand, including the careful selection of beans and some of the winnowing. They’ve used their ropes to increase productivity by automating what doesn’t change the value, such as packaging, roasting, refining with stone (rather than metal), tempering and even molding. Since October, there have been factory tours every Saturday.

Even though nothing initially predisposed them to the profession, Elfi Maldonado and Maxime Simard have become outstanding chocolate artisans. Driven by an unwavering love that guides them, they have managed to operate a fairer trade and extract the quintessence of pure ancestral cocoa… It's so easy to fall in love with Qantu!