Coffee and chocolate
Ecuador grows a large majority of the world's fine-flavour cacao and some genuinely excellent coffee, and for most of the last century it exported nearly all of the good ones and drank the rest. That is changing, quickly, in Quito. It also means the best things this country makes are cheaper here than anywhere you will ever see them again.
The short version
- Look for the words Nacional or Arriba on a chocolate label. That is the heritage variety and the reason Ecuador is famous.
- Ecuador grows under 10% of the world's cacao by volume, but most of its fine-flavour cacao.
- Buy before the Galápagos, not after. Everything on the islands was shipped there from here, at a markup.
- Ecuadorian coffee is excellent and almost entirely exported. Quito's cafés have caught up in the last decade.
- Both travel well, weigh little, and cost a fraction of what you would pay at home.
Why "Arriba"
The story is a good one and probably at least half true.
Cacao traders arriving at the port of Guayaquil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries asked where the finest beans came from, and were pointed inland, up the river: arriba, arriba. The name stuck. What they were being sent towards was Nacional, a cacao variety native to Ecuador and, then as now, regarded by many chocolate makers as the most aromatic in the world.
Good Nacional does not taste like the chocolate most people grew up with. It is floral rather than powerful — jasmine, fresh herbs, honey, sometimes a note of orange — with a soft acidity and very little bitterness. Makers use it as a benchmark for elegance rather than intensity.
By the early twentieth century Ecuador was one of the world's great cacao exporters. Then witch's broom and monilia arrived in the 1910s and 1920s and destroyed most of the plantations. The industry never fully recovered its position, and other countries filled the gap.
The argument on every label
Here is the thing worth understanding before you buy anything, because it explains why two Ecuadorian bars can taste nothing alike.
In the 1960s an Ecuadorian breeder named Homero Castro produced a hybrid on his fifty-first attempt — CCN-51. It resists disease, tolerates difficult conditions and yields around three times what Nacional does. After El Niño devastated the Nacional crop again in 1997 and 1998, it spread very fast.
Opinions on it are genuinely divided, and both are reasonable. A sensory expert at Valrhona called it a disaster for Ecuadorian quality. Producers point out that it has tripled the income of smallholder families and kept people farming cacao at all. Estimates of how much of Ecuador's crop it now represents vary enormously depending on who is counting — anywhere from a third to the large majority.
Our position is that this is a real trade-off between livelihood and flavour, and not something a hotel should adjudicate. But as a buyer you should know that "Ecuadorian chocolate" tells you almost nothing. "Nacional" tells you something.
How to buy chocolate that is actually good
- Look for Nacional or Arriba Nacional named on the packet. Its absence is not proof of anything, but its presence is a signal.
- Look for a named region or hacienda — Esmeraldas, Manabí, Los Ríos, Vinces. Traceability is the single best proxy for care.
- Check the ingredients. Cacao, sugar, sometimes cocoa butter. If there is vanilla and lecithin doing the work, the bean was not carrying it.
- 70% is the sweet spot for Nacional. Above 85% you lose the floral character under the bitterness.
- Try before you buy in bulk. Most good shops in Quito will let you taste, and there is more variation between Ecuadorian bars than most people expect.
There is a serious craft scene here now, from national brands you will find in any supermarket to very small makers producing single-estate bars. The supermarket versions are good and cheap; the small ones are remarkable and still cheaper than an ordinary bar at home.
Coffee, and the same story
Ecuador is unusual in growing both arabica and robusta, at altitudes from the coast to well above 1,500 metres, in Loja, Manabí, Intag, Zamora and elsewhere. The quality at the top end is very high.
It was also, for decades, almost entirely exported — which is why an older generation of Ecuadorians drinks instant coffee in a country that grows some of the best beans in South America. It is one of the odder legacies of a commodity economy, and visitors notice it in rural cafés.
Quito has changed completely on this in the last ten years. There are now roasters and cafés in the Old Town and in the north taking Ecuadorian single origins seriously, and the flat white you get in a good Quito café is as good as one in any European city, at a third of the price.
Ask for it filtrado or de pasar if you want brewed rather than espresso. And if someone offers you café de olla or coffee essence diluted with hot water — a very traditional preparation — try it once for the experience.
Galápagos coffee
Coffee is grown in the highlands of San Cristóbal, in volcanic soil, in the middle of the Pacific. It is a genuine curiosity, it is scarce, and it is expensive even here.
If you want it, buy it on the islands, where it is grown — that is the one thing on this page that is genuinely cheaper there. Everything else is not.
Buy before the islands, not after
This is the practical point that saves the most money, and it is counterintuitive enough that people get it wrong constantly.
Almost everything sold in the Galápagos arrived by ship from the mainland. The Ecuadorian chocolate on a shelf in Puerto Ayora was made near Quito, carried to the coast, put on a boat, and marked up for the journey. You will pay two or three times what the same bar costs here, for a product that has just travelled further than you have.
Buy your gifts in Quito on the afternoon before you fly. Then leave them with us — we store luggage free of charge — and collect them on the way home, so you are not carrying chocolate through a biosecurity inspection and a week on a boat.
The same logic covers the rest of your shopping. See what to buy in Quito before the islands.
Practicalities of carrying it home
- Chocolate melts. Not in Quito, where it is 18°C, but in the Amazon, in Guayaquil, and in a bag on a hot tarmac. Buy it late and pack it in the middle of your case.
- Bloom is not spoilage. If a bar goes pale and streaky after a temperature swing, it is still fine, just less pretty.
- Weight adds up fast. Ten bars is a kilo. Remember that island flights have tighter baggage allowances than your international ticket.
- Customs. Commercially packaged, sealed chocolate and roasted coffee are accepted almost everywhere. Raw cacao beans, nibs and green coffee are not, in several countries. If you are buying agricultural products rather than finished ones, check your own country's rules.
- Ground versus beans. Buy whole beans if you have a grinder; they survive the trip far better.
If you want to see how it is made
The best chocolate experience near Quito is in Mindo, ninety minutes away in the cloud forest, where several small makers run bean-to-bar tours for a few dollars — fermentation, roasting, winnowing, conching, with tasting throughout.
The part that changes how you shop is watching the fermentation. It is a microbial process, it takes days, and it creates the precursors of everything you will later taste. Once you have seen it, the price difference between a good bar and a supermarket one stops looking like marketing.
There are also shorter chocolate tastings in the Old Town itself, which take an hour and require no travel at all.
What we do here
Breakfast is where we put decent Ecuadorian coffee in front of you rather than instant, which should not be remarkable and still is in some places. Reception will point you to the shops we actually buy from, including the ones that are not on the tourist streets, and we will store whatever you buy while you are on the islands or in the jungle.
If you want a chocolate tasting or the Mindo tour, we book both at the desk.
Buy it here. Leave it with us. Collect it on the way home.
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house on the quiet edge of the Old Town, with free luggage storage for guests heading to the islands or the Amazon. Book direct for our lowest rate.
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Useful in front of a shelf of bars that all say Ecuador on them.
