Last week North Queensland flooded. Cardwell, forty minutes’ drive from Soma HQ, received 1700mm of rain (about three times Melbourne’s annual rainfall) in seven days. Gratefully, Soma is safe. Our team put all the cacao on the top shelves, and we were very careful with our electrics. There will be some minor logistical challenges in the coming weeks (namely, a hole in the highway outside Townsville will add extra time to most people’s shipping), but at this stage, Soma will keep running.

It surprises us how unsurprising this is.

Rose and I have spent the better part of the last decade living in the tropics, and are accustomed to extreme weather. In the last four years at Soma, we’ve sourced cacao from farmers in Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and The Solomon Islands. It seems that every month, somewhere in our little world, someone has a flood, someone a drought, someone a cyclone, someone battles a root fungus, someone stages a coup. We adapt and work out new ways to continue - such is life in the tropics.

This year we want to explore the slogan ‘Soma Cacao: Made in Paradise’.

It strikes us that most things people buy are made in China or Vietnam or Bangladesh, and the phrase ‘made in’ evokes images of​sweatshops. But cacao is made in paradise. It only grows in rich soil in areas with high annual rainfall and year-round warm temperatures. Quality cacao is shade-grown, meaning cacao farms are green havens, full of birds and flowers and springs and waterfalls.

But paradise is not a postcard. Paradise teems with life: plants, animals, snakes, lizards, insects, fungi, bacteria. Paradise is prone to flood and drought. Tropical cyclones only pass through the tropics. There are crocodiles, and mosquitoes, and heatwaves, and tropical disease. Life is challenging in paradise. Things rust and rot; there are always ants in the kitchen. Paradise is untameable. One never owns paradise; one is only ever a renter.

Paradise is harsh, but she is also gorgeous. There are few things in the world as beautiful as the first sunny day after a week of monsoon rain - one can almost hear the green grass singing. The song of tropical birds at dawn is the sweetest music. The sunshine is golden, some days feel like they’ve been hewed from gemstones.

And when you walk at night through the still-warm air in the garden, and smell the night-blooming flowers, it feels like being sixteen again, and in love.

I don’t know what madness compelled us to both live and work in paradise. I think we like the metaphor. In paradise things go wrong more often, and sometimes they go really wrong; but in paradise things go right more often, too, and sometimes they go really, really right. We decided at some point that the glory of the tropical sunrise made all the rusted air-conditioners and termite inspections worth it. In the same way, we decided we could work with late harvests and customs inspections in order to work with cacao.

It occurs to me now that all paradises follow the same rules. Khalil Gibran said that “even as love crowns you, so shall he crucify you. Even as [love] is for your growth, so is he for your pruning.”

Love is challenging. Love has its own cyclones and droughts; love shines a light on all our inner termites. Khalil Gibran again: “If in your heart you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.”

So I suppose I do know what madness compelled us to live in is paradise: it was love. For paradise follows the same rules as love.

And we hope that next time you have a cup of Soma Cacao, as you hold it to your lips you remember that it is paradise you’re tasting - that (if you’ll allow us a poetic moment) you’re tasting love.

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone. May it be full of love and chocolate.

With rose petals and coconut sugar,

Alistair, Rose, and the team at Soma Cacao Australia