Our story · the origin

We went looking for a cleaner cup.

This is the story of why a 100% cacao bar from a Dayak Ga’ai village on the Kelay River exists at all. It involves geology, a research institute, a lot of laboratory invoices, and one stubborn idea: if you’re going to drink cacao every day, you should know exactly what’s in it.

Ali, NUDE's founder, sitting in a cacao grove holding the bare ten-piece bar among a pile of red pods — Ali, in the grove; the bar back where it started.

Maria smiling under a cacao tree, reaching up to a hanging pod — Maria, who built this with me.

Chapter one · The cadmium question

Geography loads the dice.

We started where most cacao stories start: pointed at South America. Then we read the soil science. Cadmium in cacao is geogenic: it comes from the rock and soil a tree grows in, rides up through the roots, and settles in the bean. The cacao tree happens to be unusually good at collecting it!¹

In a 23-country fingerprinting study, the regional averages weren’t close:²

~1.4mg/kg cadmiumLatin American beans, average

~0.3mg/kg cadmiumAsian beans, average

For a bar you eat a square of now and then, that’s a footnote. For a cup you drink every day, it’s the whole question. So we turned away from the conventional road and pointed at Southeast Asia.

Illustration of a cacao tree in cross-section with red arrows showing cadmium rising from the rocky soil through the roots into the pods — Illustrative: how geogenic cadmium travels from parent rock to bean.¹

Chapter two · The research institute

We asked the people who breed the trees.

Indonesia has a central brain for cacao: the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), the body that studies, breeds and catalogues the country’s cacao clones. Before we bought a single sack, we went and sat with their scientists, walked the clone gardens, and asked the unglamorous question: where in this archipelago should a daily-drinking cacao come from?

Then we did what they would have done: we sampled origin after origin and sent everything to an independent laboratory.

Ali shaking hands with an ICCRI scientist on a tree-lined path at the research centre — Sealed the old way, on the institute’s walkway.

Ali, Maria and the ICCRI team at the research centre entrance — With the ICCRI team at the research centre.

Ali pointing at the KAKAO SUPER KLON MCC 02 sign in an ICCRI research plot — A clone research plot: MCC 02, a name you’ll meet again.

The sampling run

West SulawesiCadmium ran too high for a daily cup

South SulawesiSame story

PapuaLead ran high, and the cup fell flat

Java · Cianjur, Jember, CilacapCadmium high across our samples

BaliMiddling; fine, not the one

East Kalimantan · BorneoLowest cadmium and lead in our panel, and the best cup on the table

Our own commissioned laboratory results across sourcing samples, 2025–2026. Published cadmium data for Indonesian (and especially Bornean) cacao is thin, which is exactly why we tested instead of assumed. Current batch results live on How we test.

So we flew to Borneo.

Chapter three · Long Lanuk

Long Lanuk, on the Kelay River.

Cacao isn’t native to these islands; it arrived the long way round. Criollo, the delicate, aromatic ancestral variety, was planted across the archipelago first, to meet European demand for fine-flavour cocoa. When disease and demand outgrew it, the hardy, polyphenol-rich workhorse Forastero followed. And where the two crossed, first on colonial Trinidad, Trinitario was born: Criollo’s fine cup on Forastero’s potent backbone.

Berau is the youngest chapter of that story. Its cacao came across from Sulawesi within living memory and was planted on forest-edge land along the Kelay River: a young, majority-Trinitario hybrid population. Which is exactly what you want in a daily cup; the fine flavour these islands were first planted for, carrying the polyphenol content our label reports.

The people growing it are the Dayak Ga’ai, among the indigenous communities of Borneo whose villages line the Kelay. Long Lanuk is one of them. Its growers work smallholder plots of a hectare or two at the forest edge, ferment and sun-dry the beans where they grow, and they are very, very good at it:

National champions. Beans from Long Lanuk’s Nyapa Indah hamlet won first place in Indonesia’s national cocoa bean competition in November 2022; 40 entrants, judged on national standards plus cupping.
Indonesia’s first cacao GI. “Kakao Berau” holds a Geographical Indication (2021), the first ever granted to Indonesian cacao.
Fermented on purpose. Most Indonesian cacao is sold unfermented. Berau’s shift to fermented specialty beans is recent and deliberate, built with conservation partners; and fermentation is where cacao’s flavour is made.

A grower in a red shirt holding a large ripe red cacao pod beneath his trees — One of the growers we work with on the Kelay, with a pod off his own trees.

Ali running his hand through cacao beans on a drying table — Checking the drying beds ourselves.

Chapter four · The bean, on paper

So what exactly is this bean?

Cut a bean open and you can read its ancestry by eye. Forastero-leaning beans run violet inside; anthocyanins, pigments from the same broad polyphenol family as the figures on our label. Criollo-like beans stay pale ivory. ICCRI’s clone panel makes it plain.

Ours is majority Trinitario. Berau’s stock is a young hybrid population in the family of the clones we met at the institute: SUL 2, ICS, MCC 02, ICCRI 06, ICCRI 08. One of those names is on a research-plot sign we photographed. Single origin, hybrid blood; that’s not a contradiction, it’s how this variety works.

ICCRI reference panel of halved cacao beans from many clones, ranging from pale ivory to deep purple — The clone panel: pale, Criollo-like beans to deep-violet, Forastero-leaning ones. Reference imagery: ICCRI.

Illustrative comparison of three cacao pod types: pale ridged Criollo, smooth yellow Forastero, red-blushed Trinitario — Illustrative: Criollo, Forastero, Trinitario.

Illustrative macro of two halved cacao beans, one pale ivory inside and one deep violet-purple — Illustrative: the purple is anthocyanin pigment.

The house wheel: our six tasting dimensions, scored out of five. Same scores as the product page, drawn the way bean libraries draw them.

The grind matters as much as the genetics: granite wheels run the whole bean down until the particles sit around 14–18 microns, below what your tongue can resolve. That’s why a cup of NUDE feels like silk rather than grit, with nothing pressed out and nothing added back. We measured it ourselves.

Hands checking ground cacao fineness against a micron gauge over the stone grinder — Checking the grind on the gauge.

Ali at the small-batch roaster beside a drum of cacao beans in the Bali facility — Small batches, one drum at a time, in Bali.

Chapter five · The forest side of the ledger

Cacao grows in shade. That matters here.

Borneo’s lowland rainforest is one of the oldest on Earth; on the order of 130 million years, older than the Amazon. It is also under real pressure: East Kalimantan is coal country, and Berau’s farmland has been losing ground to mining and oil palm for years.

Cacao pushes the other way. It’s a shade crop; it wants trees standing around it. Grown at the forest edge, it gives farming families an income that keeps canopy up rather than clearing it. In Berau that isn’t an accident: fermented cacao is being built deliberately as a conservation-linked crop with NGO partners, in a river corridor known as orangutan habitat.

And the growing is clean: every batch we release is screened for pesticide residues, glyphosate and glufosinate included, and none have been detected. The results are public. How we test →

As for terroir: when you taste the cup and reach for words like humid, green, tropical, some of that really is the place. And at least as much is fermentation and stone-grinding, which are human choices, made well. We’ll take both.

The bare ten-piece bar standing in a split cacao pod full of white pulp, on a pile of red pods in the forest — From this to this: the bar back in the pod it came from.

That’s the whole story.

A soil map, a research institute, an origin with a national award to its name, and a bar we test every batch; because averages are not promises.

Shop the bar How we test → Recipes →

Sources and reading

Cadmium uptake in Theobroma cacao is primarily geogenic and root-mediated; see e.g. Vanderschueren et al., Science of the Total Environment 2021 (review), and Wade et al., PLOS ONE 2022. Uptake diagram is our own illustration of that mechanism.
Bertoldi et al., Food Control 2016: multi-element fingerprinting of cocoa beans across 23 countries; mean bean cadmium ≈1.4 mg/kg (Latin America) vs ≈0.3 mg/kg (Asia). Regional averages are not lot-level guarantees.
Long Lanuk / Nyapa Indah: first place, Indonesian national cocoa bean competition, 12 Nov 2022 (Dewan Kakao Indonesia; 40 entrants; judged to SNI standards plus cupping). Reported by ANTARA and provincial plantation authorities.
“Kakao Berau” Geographical Indication, granted 2021: Indonesia’s first for cacao (Kemenkumham / DJKI).
Cacao’s arrival and spread in Indonesia via colonial trade routes (Criollo for the fine-flavour trade, later Forastero, and the Trinitario cross), and East Kalimantan’s recent, Sulawesi-derived plantings: academic and government sources on file; NUDE research records, 2026.
Borneo rainforest age and biodiversity: WWF / Natural Habitat Adventures. Berau land-use pressure: provincial plantation statistics. Clone bean panel reference imagery: ICCRI.
NUDE commissioned laboratory analyses of origin samples, 2025–2026, and per-batch release testing. Internal records; current batch results published at /pages/how-we-test.