Published: September 2026 Category: The Fruit Read time: 4 minutes
Cacao was first discovered in Ecuador over 5,000 years ago. In the upper Amazon basin, in the foothills of the Andes, the Mayo-Chinchipe people started growing and consuming cacao. Archaeological evidence found in ceramic vessels at the Santa Ana-La Florida site in southeast Ecuador confirmed that the first remnants of any cacao drink correspond to the the fruit, not the bean.
From Ecuador, cacao travelled north through coastal trade routes into Mesoamerica, arriving at least 3,900 years ago.
The Maya revered Ek Chuah, their god of cacao and merchants, with yearly ceremonies of offerings, incense, and cacao seeds. The Aztecs believed that Quetzalcoatl — the feathered serpent, creator god — gifted the cacao tree to humanity before his exile. Cacao sealed marriages, accompanied rulers to their tombs, and was reserved almost exclusively for royalty and priests.
In the rainforest where cacao grew, two creatures held sacred roles in its story.
The jaguar — king of the jungle — was the guardian of the cacao plantation. In the Olmec and Maya world, stone jaguar statues were placed at the entrance to cacao fields to protect the harvest. There was even a related species called Balamte — "jaguar tree" in Maya (Theobroma bicolor, a cousin of the cacao tree) — which in Maya cosmology was considered the male counterpart to cacao's female energy. The two plants were used together in sacred ceremonial drinks, intertwined in myth and ceremony.
The colibri — the hummingbird — was the sacred pollinator. In Aztec mythology the hummingbird embodied the fertilising energy of the sun, so revered that the great war god Huitzilopochtli took his name from the Nahuatl word for hummingbird: Huitzilli. In a forest where cacao flowers needed pollinating and the hummingbird moved from bloom to bloom in a flash of iridescent colour, the connection between this tiny bird and the extraordinary fruit it helped bring to life felt nothing short of miraculous.
Two parallel drinking traditions developed from this sacred fruit. The earliest cacao drinks — going back nearly 5,000 years — were most likely made from the juice of the fruit itself, the pulp, before anyone had worked out how to process the bean. In Mesoamerica, the great civilisations developed their own path: grinding and fermenting the beans into a frothy, bitter ceremonial drink, spiced with chilli and corn. Two traditions. One extraordinary plant.
When cacao eventually reached Europe through the Spanish conquest, the reverence these civilisations had held for it was so profound that the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus formally classified it in 1753 as Theobroma cacao — "food of the gods" — in recognition of the sacred status it had carried for thousands of years.
Chocolate as we know it — sweet, solid, made with milk — came much later still, a European invention that narrowed the whole story of cacao down to its smallest part: the bean.
The fruit before the bean
Inside every cacao pod, wrapped around the beans, lives a white, translucent pulp — the mucilage. Sweet. Fragrant. Tropical. It makes up 40% of the pod by volume. The chocolate industry uses the beans, which are just 20%. The rest — the juice, the pulp, the husk — gets left behind.
That juice is what cacao water is.
The tradition that kept the secret alive
In the southern states of Mexico — Tabasco and Chiapas, the same ancient cacao-growing heartland — a tradition quietly survived.
It is called Cacaguada: a cold, refreshing drink made from the fresh juice of the cacao mucilage, passed down through generations in communities that have grown cacao for thousands of years. Most of the world has never heard of it.
What the fruit actually contains
The cacao fruit is not just delicious. It is naturally rich in compounds that the rest of the plant kingdom can rarely match.
Minerals: Potassium and Magnesium — naturally occurring in the cacao pulp.
Vitamins: Vitamins C, B1, B2 and B6 — present in the fresh fruit.
Antioxidants: Polyphenols, catechins, epicatechin and procyanidins — naturally occurring antioxidant compounds that the cacao fruit produces entirely on its own.
Flavour: Extraordinarily complex. Some people taste lychee. Some taste pineapple or tamarind. Everyone tastes something unexpected.
What CHULA is
CHULA is cacao water — the juice of the Ecuadorian cacao fruit, cold-pressed and blended with triple-filtered water. Two ingredients. Nothing added. No artificial colours, flavours, or preservatives.
The tradition of drinking cacao juice is 5,000 years old. It started in Ecuador. It was kept alive in Mexico. And now it is here — waiting to be discovered by everyone in the UK.
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