Ancestral Roots: A Cacao Ritual

Following our morning dialogue between tea and cacao, join Phoebe Preuss, cultural facilitator, chocolatier, and co-founder of Living Koko, together with Kenny and Min of Fang Studio, for a guided cacao ritual inherited through Phoebe’s Samoan ancestral lineage.

Among the people of Samoa, cacao — or koko in Samoan — carries lineage, hospitality, memory, and relationship, and is a tradition preserved and shared across generations.

During the ritual, we will roast cacao beans by hand, grind them, and prepare the drink through an intentional process, honouring the ways this practice has been passed down. In working with the koko, we enter into relationship with the people and traditions from which this practice comes, with one another as a community, and with the land upon which we gather. As we have been taught, to work with koko is also to honour the land beneath our feet.

Koko is also a Samoan…