My friend E. sent me a box of Kingsbite chocolate bars last month. He brought these back from his visit to Ghana last year. He’s gone back again vacationing and I hope he brings more and this time, they get to me sooner.

Kingsbite is manufactured by the mostly state owned Cocoa Processing Company under the Goldentree brand name. Ghana is one of the leading producers and exporters of cocoa and thousands of its citizens are cocoa farmers. My grandmother had a cocoa tree in her yard when I was a kid and what I remember most about it was that each bean was encased in a sweet pulpy substance.

I haven’t had Goldentree chocolate in a while but I’ve had other bars produced from Ghanaian cocoa beans. Divine Chocolate uses Fair Trade Ghanaian beans and makes pretty good chocolate too, I highly recommend their products.

There were three varieties of chocolate in the Kingsbite box; dark chocolate and two milk – I couldn’t really tell the difference between the two milk chocolates except for the wrapper colours.

The texture is matte, not shiny or glossy like other bars. It doesn’t melt in your mouth easily; it melts slowly. The consistency is slightly coarse, a little hard – you can’t break a piece off easily.

It has a uniquely strong cocoa-y taste and a wonderful sweet aroma of cocoa and something else – light and sweet but not vanilla.

I really enjoyed the bars because they were a little different in flavour and texture. A friend called them exotic; I like to think of them as unique.