MUDGEE – The New South Wales town of Mudgee, in the Cudgegong Valley, has a reputation as a wine region and as a tourist destination, but it is also home to a backyard chocolate factory with ties to the Pacific.

Luke and Thea Spencer run the tiny factory from their Mudgee home, roasting and processing cocoa beans from an island in Vanuatu for the making single-source handmade chocolates.

Spencer Cocoa is a relatively young business. The Spencer’s have been making chocolate for three years in their purpose built shed at the back of their property.

“We are the little factory in the suburbs of Mudgee,” he said.

“But we don’t get many complaints from our neighbours – because all of our smells are really, really good smells.”

“We roast between 40 and 60 kilos of cocoa beans a week,” Luke Spencer said.

Spencer Cocoa makes what is known in the business as “single plantation” chocolate – using cocoa beans grown, picked, fermented and dried on the island of Malekula, Vanuatu.

Luke maintains his connection with the cocoa growers, travelling to the island twice per year to select the beans.

The process of growing and transporting the cocoa beans from Vanuatu has not changed in decades, he said.

They are picked and packed in bags and then carried by hand into the containers aboard ships.

The process is time consuming but, as Spencer points out, it uses no fossil fuels and employs a large workforce of manual labourers.

The story started in 2010 when Luke was working to help rejuvenate a cocoa plantation in a remote part of Vanuatu.

It was here that Luke and his wife fell in love with cocoa, and the idea of making really excellent chocolate back in Australia.

Coming from a viticulture background, and as a fan of good chocolate, Luke was keen to discover the origins of good chocolate – following the same principles that apply to making good wine: the fruit (cocoa beans), where they’re grown (the soil and the climate), and how this gives uniqueness to the end product (the chocolate).

Over the next four years, Luke went ahead and helped the local growers to set up a co-op that saw the growers bringing their bean harvest to a central fermenting and drying facility for processing.

The beans are grown and harvested by a community of men, women – and even a few children in their school holidays – something that is a part of the island’s life and culture.

The beans are then scooped from the fruit in the field before being fermented in their natural sweet sap, and later dried in wood-fired heat blowers.

From that processing unit, situated in the middle of the plantation divided into the local growers plots, Spencer cocoa buys their beans directly.

No middle men, no bean brokers, no global supply chains.

The growers ferment and dry the beans before they are shipped to Spencer Cocoa. What makes this unique, is that in Vanuatu cocoa beans are often dried by wood fire smoke, which creates a distinct taste profile specific to chocolate made from the region’s cacao.

When the cocoa arrives at Mudgee, it is dried out in the sun before it is roasted in the first of a series of processing steps.

The finished chocolate products are banded with traditional ni-Vanuatu designs.