But she failed the entrance exam and, to her grandmother’s pride, ended up finding her true self in the kitchen, where she combined her love of food with her aptitude for chemistry.

Together with her family, she began preparing complex recipes based on books her father insisted on buying for her. The longer and more difficult the challenge, the more fun the family had in the kitchen. One Christmas, they were involved in making an elaborate turkey. It took three days to prepare, requiring supervision every three hours.

It was during this period of intense experimentation with the stove that Luisa stumbled upon a step-by-step guide to making chocolate in a book her father gave her, * Elements of Dessert *, by chef Francisco Migoya. She needed two things: a mill (also known as a melanger) and cocoa, of course. Her father managed to obtain the mill, but the cocoa was a bit more complicated.

Luisa and her father embarked on a long period of research that led them to the origin of everything, the Amazon Rainforest, from where cocoa was transported to other corners of the planet. Intrigued, they wondered: why hadn’t they seen chocolates made with Amazonian cocoa? Then came the plan to personally visit the São Sebastião Community, on the Purus River in Acre, and better understand what this wild cocoa was all about. There they were able to see the positive impact of their production chain on families and the environment. It was a path of no return.

Even today, accessing this cocoa is no easy task, and extracting it from the forest is an even more exhausting task. But Luisa and her father saw this challenge as a window to do something different, with enormous potential to benefit residents and the extraordinary forest.