Auro Chocolate
Two best friends who grew up streets apart in the Philippines, met at university in Chicago, stumbled upon a craft chocolate shop using Filipino cacao, and came home to build the tree-to-bar company that put Philippine beans on the podium at Salon du Chocolat Paris.
Shop Auro ChocolateAuro Chocolate is the answer to a question two Filipino kids asked in a Chicago chocolate shop: if the Philippines has some of the world’s best cacao, why isn’t there a world-class Filipino chocolate brand? Mark Ocampo and Kelly Go spent the next decade making one. The result? A tree-to-bar operation in Davao that's internationally awarded.
The Founders
Mark Ocampo
Co-Founder
Kelly Go
Co-Founder
Fast Facts
They Grew Up Streets Apart. They Met in Chicago. They Came Home to Change What Filipino Cacao Means to the World.
Mark Ocampo and Kelly Go grew up in the Philippines a few streets from each other and never once crossed paths. They met in Chicago while attending different colleges and bonded immediately over food, culture, and a shared conviction that they would eventually move back and do something that mattered. The specific something came into focus around 2010, when they walked into an American craft chocolate shop and saw Philippine cacao listed as an ingredient. They were stunned. The Philippines had been growing and exporting some of the world’s finest cacao for decades. No Filipino company had built a world-class chocolate brand around it.
Kelly moved to Paris and earned a Culinary Arts diploma from Le Cordon Bleu, then studied industrial chocolate production at ZDS College in Germany. Mark lived in New York, working in advertising. Kelly’s mother — a kitchen design consultant and pastry chef — began grassroots research with cacao farmers in Davao. By 2015, all three were back in the Philippines. Auro Chocolate launched its first products in May 2017: tree-to-bar chocolate made entirely in the Philippines, from Philippine cacao, with farmers treated not as suppliers but as business partners, co-owners of the outcome, trained in financial literacy and basic business administration.
“We always strive to provide the best cacao and chocolate products by embracing the ethos of thinking globally and acting locally. We also challenge ourselves and the communities we work with to reach higher to improve not only the quality and consistency of our products, but also our social and environmental impact.”
Kelly Go, Co-Founder of Auro Chocolate
The international recognition came quickly. In October 2019, at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris, Auro Chocolate and their partner farmer Jose Saguban were named one of the Top 20 Best Cacao Beans in the World by the Cocoa of Excellence Programme, the first time the Philippines had ever placed. In 2020, the Academy of Chocolate awarded Auro ten international medals. The Philippines, long known as a cacao-exporting country, was finally being recognized as a chocolate-making country.
Auro’s range spans single-origin dark bars, milk and white chocolate, and flavor-forward collections drawing on Filipino pantry staples — cashew, mocha, local ingredients reimagined into precision-crafted bars. Every product traces directly to a named farm and a named farmer.
Why We Featured Them
What Makes Auro Chocolate Different
01
First Filipino Cacao on the Paris Podium
In 2019, Auro Chocolate and farmer Jose Saguban were named one of the Top 20 Best Cacao Beans in the World at the Salon du Chocolat, the first time the Philippines had ever placed at the Cocoa of Excellence Programme. The country had been exporting the beans for decades. Auro made the world pay attention to who was growing them.
02
Farmers as Business Partners
Auro doesn’t source from farmers — it builds with them. Cacao growers receive financial literacy training, basic business education, and the tools to understand what their crop is worth. Farmer Jose Saguban’s name appears in international award listings. That is not charity. That is a different model of what a supply chain can be.
03
Tree-to-Bar, Made Entirely in the Philippines
From Davao cacao farms to finished bars, every step of Auro’s production happens in the Philippines. The country that had long shipped its finest cacao abroad for foreign chocolatiers to process now has a brand doing the full craft at home, and winning ten Academy of Chocolate medals in a single year.
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