07/06/2026
We love hearing about our winners' stories, and Marco from the Pastry Training Centre of Vancouver shared theirs:
'A quick story about us, we are actually the Pastry Training Centre of Vancouver and we have been providing professional education for aspiring chefs for over 16 years here in Beautiful British Columbia, Canada. We are offering courses in Professional Pastry, Artisan Bread Baking, Cake Decorating and of course, Chocolate making.
Common Ground Cacao is our bean-to-bar chocolate brand, launched about five years ago. We created it to ensure that young chefs or anyone training in the field of pastry are exposed to high-quality chocolate right at the beginning of their education in the Pastry Kitchen. We felt it essential to expose our students to the process of how chocolate is made, its origin, and its history to ignite their passion for high-quality chocolate and steer them away from commercial chocolate manufacturers.
While traveling in Peru in 2025 to visit some of the cacao farmers we source our beans from, I was amazed in a Lima coffee shop—Peru's gritty capital—by how many people ordered fresh orange juice on ice topped with espresso shots. Not only did I fall in love with this drink, but it was also the inspiration for our Coffe Orange 55% Milk Chocolate bar. This lovely bar is crafted with the amazing Awajun Cacao from the northern Amazon department of Peru, chunks of candied orange peel, which we slow candy ourselves and roasted Colombian coffee beans.
Our second bronze medal of 2025 was awarded to our Mazamari Milk Chocolate 53%. We achieved our goal of creating a well-balanced milk chocolate using the floral cacao bean from Mazamari, located in the southern jungle of Junin, Peru. Gently roasted milk powder and a hint of Tonka Beans give this milk chocolate a very unique flavour profile.'
So interesting! Thank you for sharing 💜
