Why To'ak Chocolate Is The Most Expensive In The World

If you're a wine, whiskey, or cheese lover, you know there are a broad range of options you can choose from. For instance, you can buy a version of Two Buck Chuck, the merlot from Trader Joe's wine label Charles Shaw and a historically inexpensive bottle of wine. Or you can buy a 2007 Cote de Nuits from Domaine Leroy, maker of the most expensive bottles of wine in the world, for just under $40,000. If you'd prefer the latter and have a taste for chocolate, you might want to consider trying To'ak, the Ecuador-based chocolate company which sells a 1.76-ounce bar of Andean Alder Aged chocolate for $220. The price, the founders say, is due to the chocolate's limited availability, the unique terroir of the Ecuadorian Andes, and the company's unique aging process.

"Our goal was to make chocolate in a way that had never been done before," Jerry Toth, To'ak co-founder writes on the company's website. The idea was to elevate chocolate from being candy to something more on the level of vintage wine or aged whiskey. Toth says he and his partners were inspired by the success of bean-to-bar makers like Scharffen Berger — reportedly Julia Child's go-to bar for baking – which produced small-batch chocolate with organic, responsibly-sourced, and/or single origin cacao beans.

Jerry Toth and his partners took bean-to-bar a few steps further with "tree-to-bar" chocolate, sourced from an Ecuadorian cacao variety called Nacional that was thought to have been extinct until To'ak rediscovered one of the last surviving groves. Using beans from those trees, To'ak — the name is a combination of indigenous Ecuadorian words for "earth" and "tree" — borrowed the methods used by both winemakers and whiskey distilleries, playing close attention to the impact the climate and earth have on the chocolate produced. To'ak also began barrel-aging chocolate for up to six years, using different woods to impart a variety of flavors.

Like other high-end chocolate makers, To'ak notes the percentage of cacao in the bar on its label. The percentage notes how much of the bar is cocoa or cacao with the remaining percentage consisting of sugar and other added ingredients. To'ak's bars range from 65% to 100% cacao. Mixed in with many of the company's bars are other ingredients from the region: Galapagos-harvested salt and oranges, Andean amaranth and mint, nuts from the South American rainforest, and even Amazonian ants. What you won't find in To'ak's bars are additives like PGPR, an emulsifier used in inexpensive chocolate.

The good news is you can try To'ak's chocolate for considerably less than $220 per bar. A package of four half-ounce chocolate squares from its Alchemy collection is $15 –- about a quarter of the price of Leroy's least expensive wine.