Allo Simonne just took two Golds at the 2026 ICA Canadian competition — for buckwheat, sweet-clover flowers and a cacao cousin called Jaguar. A short, jargon-heavy love letter to everything that isn't single-origin dark.

Despite being the newest trend in chocolate, I find the name functional chocolate absolutely horrible. It suggests you can do something with it besides eat it — hammer a nail into the wall, say, or feed the fish in your aquarium. (Don't. It's a terrible idea, and the fish will not thank you.) But it is what it is, the name is already established on the market, and so, as the song says — let it be.

If you know, you know. And if you don't, this is a good place to begin — because the bar in question is made from one of the oldest and rarest cacaos on Earth, grown in a valley most people will never reach, by a maker who sold her home to get to it.