The world's most expensive chocolate

Move over, saffron and truffles - there’s a new aspirational food in town.

At US$260 for a single 50 g bar, To’ak Chocolate is the most expensive chocolate in the world, according to its creators.

They further claim the chocolate has the exotic DNA to justify its price, as the luxury treat is sourced from cacao trees that represent one of the last genetically pure remnants of a rare heirloom variety called Nacional.

Native to Ecuador and famous for its complex flavour profile, Nacional cacao was considered by many of Europe’s earliest chocolatiers to be the world’s most prized cacao in the 1800s. The variety was nearly driven to extinction in 1917 after the outbreak of Witch’s Broom disease.

In recent years, many experts did not believe that pure Nacional cacao trees still existed, until To’ak co-founders Jerry Toth and Carl Schweizer found a grove of Nacional cacao trees growing semiwild in the valley of Piedra de Plata, deep in the hills of coastal Ecuador. To’ak Chocolate was born from a rainforest conservation project in Ecuador, and Toth and Schweizer are now working with cacao growers in Piedra de Plata to protect these rare Nacional cacao trees and sustain the genetic line through grafting and seed banks.

To’ak produced only 574 bars of its inaugural 2014 edition and currently 89 are still available from its website. For the price, buyers expect a little more than foil and paper packaging, so each bar is packaged in a handcrafted Spanish Elm wooden box with the individual bar number engraved on the back. The box includes Spanish Elm tasting utensils (to prevent bare hands from sullying the product) and a 116-page booklet that provides a guide to the ritual of dark-chocolate tasting and tells the story of the rare bean’s sourcing. A single cacao bean is set in the centre of each bar as a visual link to the chocolate’s rare origins.