Orange & Gubinge Luvju - Raw Organic Chocolate

Nutrition Information

Serving Size 35g

Health Benefits

Gubinge

Gubinge is a bush plum; there's a lot of hype around stuff coming out of the Amazon, Acai and so on, but Gubinge is a really powerful indigenous Australian superfood. It's the highest natural source of Vitamin C on the planet, and that's been verified. The species is called Terminalia Ferdinandiana, more popularly known as the Kakadu plum, and it grows in the Kakadu and the Kimberleys. The Kimberley version however has tested higher than the Kakadu version for Vitamin C. In the Kimberleys, where it is known as Gubinge, they're not irrigating it or cultivating it using typical commercial horticultural techniques, which a number of operations up in the Northern Territory are doing. Essentially, those precious vital phytonutrients (the antioxidants within plants) are there to make the plant itself stronger. They do the same for the plant as they do for us, so if you pamper the plant too much, it doesn't need them anymore! If that plant is in its natural environment and there's a certain level of environmental stress present, that makes the plant stronger, so you get these higher levels of antioxidants.

The Gubinge Powder that we produce and market under the Nyul Nyul brand is a raw whole food and in terms of the nutritional aspects, it's one of the only high Vitamin C products on the market that literally is a whole food. A whole food that just happens to have 13% Vitamin C. To make it we simply take the whole frozen fruit, dehydrate it at 40ºC for 16 hours and then mill it into a powder, so in essence all we have done is take away the water: everything else is there in the powder. The thing about it being a whole food is that nature packages these things in such a manner that they can easily be absorbed; Vitamin C is one important phytonutrient, but like most things, for that to be absorbed into the system, there are a couple of other things that the body really needs to be able to properly utilise it. Those other things are also important and carry out functions, but in our Western approach we tend to reduce things; there is in fact awhole, so in terms of a supplement it's amazing. It's packaged with everything; not only is it the highest natural source of Vitamin C, but it also includes everything else your body needs to assimilate the Vitamin C. All the synthetic Vitamin C supplements and extracts, they're going to be a lot cheaper in terms of milligram for milligram of Vitamin C. In terms of overall effectiveness however...they're incomparable. Two different worlds.

Cacao

Antioxidants

Raw Cacao beans contain 10 grams of flavonol antioxidants per 100 grams, which is an incredible 10%. Research has also demonstrated that the antioxidants in cacao are highly stable and easily available to human metabolism. In the adjacent table you can see that our Loving Earth Raw Chocolate has more antioxidants than Goji Berries and Acai Berries. The ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) scale was developed by the United States Department of Agriculture to measure the ability of antioxidants to absorb free radicals, which normally cause cell and tissue damage. The higher the ORAC score, the higher the level of antioxidants present in the food.

Magnesium for the Heart and Brain

Raw cacao is the primary dietary source of magnesium, the most deficient mineral in western civilisation. Magnesium is the most important mineral for a healthy functioning heart. It also plays a key role in producing energy for the neurons in the brain from glucose. So when there is an abundance of magnesium the brain works with clarity and focus.

Mood elevators and Anti-depressants

Cacao is a great source of serotonin, dopamine, anandamide and phenylethylamine (PEA), four well-studied neurotransmitters, which are associated with feelings of well being and help alleviate depression. Both PEA and Anandamide (the bliss chemical) are found in abundance in the brains of happy people and are particularly released when we are feeling happy. Both of these nuerotransmitters are present in raw cacao in large enough quanitities to affect the brain and lift our moods. Cacao also contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAO Inhibitors) that keep neurotransmitters in the bloodstream for longer without being broken down.

We have all experienced the positive feelings associated with eating chocolate, now we have access to pure raw unadulterated chocolate in the form of organic raw cacao. This is much more potent than the processed chocolate and doesn't have any sugar or dairy products blocking the positive effects of all the goodies in raw cacao. My experience is that eating 11 raw cacao beans is enough to experience a blissful sense of well being.

How to Use

Our Orange & Gubinge Chocolate Luvju is a delicious energising snack for whenever you need a boost.

Processing

Gubinge

Our grower Bruno Dann is one of the stolen generation from the area north of Broome, near James Price Point, where they're planning on putting in the massive gas hub. He lived a fairly traumatic life, taken away from his mother at birth by missionaries. Back then it was law that Aboriginal women had to give birth in hospital, so that their babies could immediately be taken and given to missionaries. Bruno's mother ran away and actually gave birth to him in the wilderness, hence Bruno’s special connection with the land; on the weekends they'd let him go and spend time with the elders, but when he came back, if the missionaries found out that he'd been speaking his language or engaging with his culture, he was beaten. Yet they couldn't stop him: Bruno picked up enough traditional knowledge that together with his partner Marion, he was able to start reviving those traditional ways of taking care of the land. Gubinge grows up there in natural wild orchards, three or four trees together throughout the Bush. Each year the fire comes through and destroys everything, so what Bruno and his people began doing is back-burning, clearing the dead wood so that the fire's not coming through any more. They soon noticed that through these traditional ways of taking care of the land, the Gubinge trees started producing more fruit...

Each year Bruno coordinates the harvest. The picking season goes from December through March. Depending on the weather, it can be as long as three months or as short as six weeks, and there are designated spots where people can pick from. Most of the harvesters are from Bruno's language group and the surrounding areas and people get paid by the kilo, so come Gubinge season, everyone gets out on the land and picks it. It's a really good project because it's a high-value product and it's something that's growing wildly, so there's a fair bit of it around and it's sustainable. The other thing that Bruno is doing is working with people to show them how to care for the land throughout the rest of the year. People see what Bruno's achieved and then they say alright, we're going to do that as well. It's not just about the Gubinge: it's about the whole environment. If you're taking care of the land, the Gubinge will thrive...but so will everything else. Gubinge is their asset, it's the thing that they've got up there. It's something that's benign, that's sustainable and supports the environment. The other main industry up there is mining, which is unsustainable and which destroys the environment.

It took us at Loving Earth a couple of years to really get the project going, since we needed to develop the infrastructure and figure out how we were going to process the fruit. Scott stayed in touch with Bruno, and when we finally got our commercial dehydrator and found a special grinding machine from India, we were in business. That was a couple of years after the initial contact, during which time we'd been working on the post-harvest infrastructure to collect, clean and pack the fruit into frozen storage. With everything in place to really get stuck into the project, Scott returned for harvest season two years after first contact...the difference was amazing. The traditional harvesting techniques were paying massive dividends, and the quality was incredible. We got the frozen fruit down here to Melbourne and figured out how to process it into a powder. We did some trials, got some tests done and found out that we were getting really high levels of Vitamin C. That's when we began commercialising it. We got our graphic designer to come up with a logo, Nyul Nuyl, which is the language group for Bruno's people, and this is the brand we have created for the community up there.

Cacao

First of all, the cacao pods are harvested from the trees and cracked open. The beans are then taken out and fermented. The level of fermentation affects the flavour; we do a low fermentation of about 45 degrees C, as otherwise the temperatures can get quite high, which affects the structure of the nutrients. The main thing that Loving Earth does differently to other chocolate makers is that we don't roast the raw cacao beans before we process them. The standard procedure in the chocolate industry is to roast the raw cacao, which helps bring out the flavour. It removes a lot of the microbiological contamination they might contain, but it also removes some of the valuable antioxidants contained within. What we do instead is wash them with a citric-based organic disinfectant. Afterwards, they're dried in large commercial dehydrators, at controlled temperatures, before being winnowed into nibs, which basically means taking the skin off them. Then we grind them into liquor, and finally we press them into powder and butter.

Basically, we get five products from this process. We get raw cacao beans, and because we've disinfected and washed them you can eat them - raw! We get raw cacao nibs, which are the beans without the skin. We get raw cacao liquor, which is the nibs ground into a paste. Then when we take the the liquor and put it into a very high-pressure press, which presses all the fat and butter out of it. So the end product is the raw cacao butter and then this hard cake that's milled into raw cacao powder. 1kg of liquor is about 50% fat, so when you press the liquor you get about 40% cacao butter and 60% powder. The powder retains about 10% fat content after pressing, and all the antioxidants plus a lot of the nutrients are concentrated in that powder.

We buy and import these five products, which we use to make our raw chocolate from scratch. When indigenous communities such as our friends in Peru manage to add as much value as possible at the point of origin, not only do we support agricultural industry, but also the development of that community. We get the five basic materials we need to make our chocolate, and they earn more, allowing them to further develop infrastructure to process their cacao.

Packaging

Since we wanted to invest all aspects of Luvju with meaning, the packaging we’ve created is based around the classic heart symbol, formed by placing two of our drop-shaped logos together.

We worked for a long time to get the first compostable metalised film that’s just become available in Europe. We’ve had it laminated to a paper finish on the outside, so it’s actually 96% plant-based compostable material, and then designed a beautiful box that it all goes in with an inventive little dispenser printed on recycled board with vegetable inks.

The artwork has also had a lot of time put into it, with a unique design on the front of each box incorporating totems which reflect the spirit of each of the flavours. With our Orange & Gubinge Chocolate Luvju we’ve got the echidna, symbolizing the Kimberleys and Australia, aswell as the immune protection which the ingredients bestow.