About Us

Rooted in Ecuador, Raised in Minnesota.

Everything we make begins with a seed, and a family that refused to let go of where it came from.

Hacienda San José has been growing cacao in Los Ríos, Ecuador since the 1930s. Now five generations of the same family, the same land, and the same deep belief that cacao grown with care tastes like nothing else in the world. In 2021, the hacienda was awarded the Cacao of Excellence Silver Award; a recognition that what our family has been awarded quietly for nearly a century is truly extraordinary.

In 2018, I — Monica Jimenez — brought Hacienda San Jose Chocolate to Minneapolis. I had built a career in finance, survived cancer, and moved to Minnesota with my husband and four children. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I asked myself a question that changed everything: why should our family's chocolate travel to Europe and not the United States? Why couldn't it come directly to me, and to the people I now called my neighbors? So, I brought San Jose Chocolate, a fine-flavor, single-origin, bean-to-bar chocolate from our family's farm in Ecuador directly to Minnesota tables.

But the story didn't stop there. Minneapolis welcomed us with open arms, and that welcome gave our family courage. We began asking a bigger question: what if we didn't just bring our family's chocolate here, but made something with it here? With local hands, local ingredients, and the spirit of both places we now called home?

That became Inkakaw. Handcrafted chocolate bars, spreads, hot chocolate, brewing cacao, and ceremonial cacao. Made right here in Minnesota, using San José Chocolate as our foundation, and Amazon Rainforest cacao sourced directly from Kichwa ancestral farmers as our second origin. Two extraordinary sources. One shared vision of what ethical, traceable cacao can be.

Inkakaw and San Jose Chocolate is not just a business. It is a bridge between a farm and a kitchen, between two countries, between tradition and something new. 

We are San José Chocolate and Inkakaw. Rooted in Ecuador. Raised in Minnesota. And grateful every single day for both.