Exporting Guatemala Mayan Cacao | Ethical Fashion Guatemala
Ethical Fashion Guatemala continues to provide services for Exporting Guatemala Mayan Cacao for producers around Lake Atitlan, Antigua, Tikal, and Guatemala City. The point of this blog post is to explain the rules for exporting a food product, Mayan Ceremonial Cacao is a processed food product, and as such, health standard rules apply.
Mayan Ceremonial Cacao production takes raw Cacao beans, made into blocks of Chocolate, many claiming have spiritual values. From a food safety standpoint, you have a chocolate bar ready for human consumption. Each country has Food Health Standard rules for importing a processed food product.
Ethical Fashion Guatemala receives requests to export 25 kilos of Cacao to say Australia, shipped to friends acting as a reseller for the producer. Australia, Asia, and the UE require the importer to be the friend to have a business license and in many cases an import license for food products. Without your shipment will sit in Customs and in many cases returned or abandoned.
Exporting Cacao to the United States requires a document called an FDA Prior notice which Ethical Fashion Guatemala free of charge for our clients. Without your Cacao, shipment will never arrive in the US.
Prior Notice FDA of imported shipments of articles of food prior to their arrival in the United States. Including information about the product quantity, packaging, related facilities, such as the manufacturer, shipper, owner, and ultimate consignee.
Exporting Cacao to Canada, without getting into detail almost impossible without pre-approved permits from Canada and Sanitary permits issued by the Guatemala Government.
For the last three years, Ethical Fashion Guatemala has exported both Cacao Beans and Cacao blocks of Chocolate to over 130 countries under our contract with DHL Global services. We have the process down.
The Mayans, (in Guatemala), by contrast, do leave some surviving writings about cacao which confirm the identification of the drink with the gods. The Dresden Codex specifies that it is the food of the rain deity Kon, the Madrid Codex that gods shed their blood on the cacao pods as part of its production.
The Maya people gathered once a year to give thanks to the god Ek Chuah who they saw as the Cacao god. The consumption of the chocolate drink is also depicted on pre-Hispanic vases.
The Maya seasoned their chocolate by mixing the roasted cacao seed paste into a drink with water, chile peppers, and cornmeal, transferring the mixture repeatedly between pots until the top was covered with a thick foam.
There were many uses for cacao among the Maya. It was used in official ceremonies and religious rituals, at feasts and festivals, as funerary offerings, as a tribute, and for medicinal purposes. Both cacao itself and vessels and instruments used for the preparation and serving of cacao were used for important gifts and tribute. Cacao beans were used as currency, to buy anything from avocados to turkeys to sex.
A rabbit, for example, was worth ten cacao beans, (called “almonds” by the early sixteenth-century chronicler Francisco Oviedo y Valdés), a slave about a hundred, and the services of a prostitute, eight to ten “according to how they agree,” The beans were also used in betrothal and marriage ceremonies among the Maya, especially among the upper classes.
Originally published at https://ethicalfashionguatemala.com on August 9, 2020.
