What Is Bean-to-Bar Chocolate?

A Complete Process: From Bean to Bar

The term bean-to-bar refers to chocolate made entirely in-house, from whole cocoa beans to finished bars.

Rather than using pre-made chocolate, bean-to-bar makers process raw cocoa beans themselves.

This means they oversee every step:

It’s a complete process, artisanal or semi-artisanal, that demands time, precision, and genuine expertise.

This full control allows the maker to:

carefully choose their raw ingredients,
master every stage of transformation,
preserve the natural flavor profile of each cacao origin, without unnecessary additives or standardization.

It’s a bit like a winemaker who cultivates their own vineyard and vinifies the grapes themselves, rather than bottling a ready-made wine.

It’s important to note: bean-to-bar is not a protected designation.

Any chocolate company can use it, even large industrial players, as long as they start from whole cocoa beans, even if:

In short, bean-to-bar doesn’t necessarily mean good, ethical, or artisanal.

At Orfève, we go further than bean-to-bar:

We select our cocoa beans based on traceability, ethics, sustainability, origin, variety, and fermentation quality.
We carry out every step of the process in our own manufacture in Geneva.
Each recipe is crafted to reveal the purest expression of the cacao, with no added flavors, lecithin, or unnecessary fats.

For us, true chocolate begins at harvest, and ends on the palate, with nothing artificial in between.