Could cacao be the new matcha?
There is a growing conversation around cacao becoming the next big drink.
For years, many people have been looking for alternatives to coffee. Matcha found its moment. Chai became part of everyday café culture. And now, perhaps, cacao is having its own.
But I wonder if we are asking the wrong question.
We are less interested in whether cacao will become the new matcha than in how we will choose to relate to cacao if it does.
Because popularity does not necessarily create understanding.
We could put cacao on every café menu, create endless new flavours, add syrups and sugar, queue for it every morning and share beautiful brown cups across social media, while remaining completely disconnected from what cacao actually is and from everything that makes that cup possible.
Cacao comes from somewhere.
There is soil behind it. Rain. Forests. Pollinators. Farmers. Communities. Knowledge. Trade. History. Culture. Generations of people who have cultivated relationships with this plant long before it became part of the contemporary wellness conversation.
Perhaps this new interest in cacao gives us an opportunity to do something differently.
Not simply to find another drink to consume, but to become more curious about the relationships behind what we consume.
To ask where our cacao comes from. Who grew it. How it was produced. What percentage of cacao is actually in the drink in our hands. What else has been added to it. And what kind of agricultural and cultural system our purchase is participating in.
Because if cacao becomes the next matcha but our relationship with it remains purely transactional, very little has changed.
Perhaps the opportunity is to move from consumption to relationship.
A cup of cacao can remind us that food never appears in isolation. Every ingredient connects us to landscapes, people, histories and living systems: systems from which we were never separate in the first place.
So perhaps the question is not:
Will cacao become the new matcha?
But:
If cacao becomes the next big thing, are we ready to meet it differently?
Somos Semilla. 🌱