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# Chocolate with a postcode
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/queensland-chocolate/
- Published: 2026-08-29T06:04:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T04:43:23.000Z
- Description: New research with Far North Queensland's cocoa growers has found that half a chocolate bar's flavour comes from the place where the beans ferment, and Queensland's regions each taste different.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Sustainable Living, All stories

Wine drinkers have always known that place matters. It turns out chocolate agrees. Food chemist Dr Marlize Bekker of the University of Queensland has been working with cocoa growers in the state's tropical far north, fermenting beans at three locations, and the results are a delight: beans fermented at Mossman come out fruity, Mission Beach leans rich and chocolatey, and Fishery Falls sits somewhere in between. The reason is the invisible workforce. Cocoa ferments using the tiny microorganisms that live naturally in each place, and as they work they produce the compounds that become chocolate's buttery and tropical fruit notes, so roughly half of the finished flavour belongs to the location rather than the tree. For grower and chocolate maker Chris Jahnke at Mission Beach, that is not a quirk to iron out but an identity to celebrate.

![A hand holding cocoa beans drying in the sun over a full drying bed](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/08/cacao-beans-drying.jpg)

David Kebu Jnr holds cocoa beans drying in the sun. Photo: Irene Scott, AusAID, CC BY 2.0

It is also the next chapter of a quietly wonderful Australian story. The country's cocoa industry began at the edge of the Daintree, where Daintree Estates made the world's first Australian grown chocolate in 2011 as a grower owned venture, giving farming families a crop with a future alongside cane. Now the Australian Cocoa Group, chaired by Jim McKerlie, wants to tell the story the way winemakers do, region by region, flavour by flavour, with Australian beans already earning a premium over bulk cocoa on the world market. It will only ever be a boutique harvest, grown in the wet tropics between Mossman and Mission Beach, but that is rather the point: chocolate with a postcode, made close to home. And if you happen to be shopping for someone's father this week, a block of single origin Queensland chocolate is a present that helps a young Australian industry grow.

### Questions you might have

**Where can I try Australian grown chocolate?**

Daintree Estates sells its Australian grown range online and through specialty stockists, and small makers in Far North Queensland, including growers like Chris Jahnke's at Mission Beach, sell their own bars. Look for the words Australian grown, not just Australian made.

**Why does the fermenting spot change the flavour?**

After harvest, cocoa beans ferment in their own sweet pulp, powered by whichever wild yeasts and bacteria live in that place. Different microbes make different flavour compounds, so the same tree's beans can taste fruity in one valley and chocolatey in another.

**Could cocoa grow anywhere else in Australia?**

It is a true tropical crop, so the wet tropics of Far North Queensland, roughly Mossman to Mission Beach, are its natural home here. That small footprint is part of what makes the chocolate special.

*Our short take: the full story is by Sophie Johnson for ABC Far North, 14 August 2026\. Industry background from Daintree Estates and the Australian Cocoa Group.*