A fourth-generation farmer and a chocolate maker are growing cacao the way a forest grows. Now a circular economy accelerator is helping them prove it can pay.
Most chocolate factories are made of steel and concrete. In Kibawe, a farming town in southern Bukidnon, Anitu Forest Chocolates’ story starts under a canopy. Cacao grows there among bananas, fruit trees and native hardwoods. The forest does much of the early work: it builds the soil, holds water and shades the cacao.
Married couple Marvi and Rogen Montecillo founded Anitu, registered as Anitu Forest Food Processing. They make small-batch dark chocolate bars, traditional tablea, cacao trail mix, and now a juice made from cacao pulp that used to be thrown away. The business rests on a simple claim that is hard to deliver: restoring a forest can also make a living.
A global commodity under strain
Anitu’s experiment comes at an unusual time for cacao. The International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) puts world production at about 4.7 million tonnes in the 2024/25 season. That is a recovery from roughly 4.37 million tonnes the year before, when West Africa’s poor harvests caused one of the largest supply deficits in decades and sent cocoa prices to record highs. West Africa still dominates. Côte d’Ivoire alone grows more than a third of the world’s cocoa.
Further down the value chain, analysts value the global chocolate market at roughly US$130 billion in 2025. Estimates range widely depending on how the market is defined. The raw beans are worth only a fraction of that, about US$22–24 billion a year by one estimate. Most of the money is made in processing, branding and retail, not on the farm.
The Philippines: a small producer with big ambitions
The Philippines barely registers globally. The country grows about 10,000 to 11,000 metric tonnes of cacao a year on roughly 25,500 hectares, around 0.2 percent of world output. The Department of Agriculture has estimated domestic demand at about three times that volume, so local chocolate makers and food manufacturers rely on imports.
Mindanao is the center of what the country does produce. The island group accounts for about 80 percent of national output. Davao Region alone grew about 7,807 metric tonnes in 2024, roughly 70 to 72 percent of the country’s total, and calls itself the country’s “Cacao Capital.”
Bukidnon, in Northern Mindanao, is outside that core. Its cacao sector is smaller and more scattered. That makes Anitu’s approach, which is to grow cacao, process it on site and sell a finished, branded product, more important. In an industry where the money sits in the chocolate bar, farmers who sell only dried beans miss most of the value.
The founders: farming the family land differently
For Marvi Montecillo, Anitu continues a family history. Marvi is a fourth-generation farmer. The family began farming in Barangay New Kidapawan, Kibawe, in the 1950s, growing coffee and cacao. Marvi studied biology, and that background later shaped how the farm is run.
The turn toward regeneration came out of experience. Marvi tried conventional chemical farming first and has described early mornings suiting up in heavy protective gear just to spray the fields. Then, around 2013, Marvi came across syntropic farming. It offered a different way of working: build soil and biodiversity rather than fight the land with inputs.
Anitu Forest Farm was established in 2016, on three hectares. There was no local community of syntropic farmers to learn from, so the work went by trial and error. It took about eight years before the farm showed consistent results. The farm has since grown to about nine hectares, and that patience is now the centre of how the couple talks about the business.
Rogen makes the chocolate. The bars are made by hand in small batches in a solar-powered tree-to-bar facility, and the farm’s harvest becomes products with a story attached. Together, the two now plan to scale production, develop new lines such as bonbons, open a café, and get their products onto mall shelves.
The name says what they are after. Anitu comes from the anito, the ancestral spirits that pre-colonial Filipinos honoured and that were believed to live in the natural world. For the Montecillos, the farm is meant to treat the land as something to restore, not just extract from. Their long-term goal goes beyond the farm gate: turn it into a research and learning center and help make syntropic farming mainstream in the Philippines.
How syntropic farming works
Swiss farmer Ernst Götsch developed syntropic agriculture through decades of work restoring degraded land in Brazil. The method copies how a forest regrows on its own. A syntropic farm doesn’t plant one crop in rows. It plants many species together in layers, from ground cover and bananas to fruit trees, cacao and tall native trees, timed so each stage of growth prepares the ground for the next.
Regular pruning is central. Cut branches and leaves are left on the ground, where they feed the soil, hold moisture and suppress weeds. That reduces the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Cacao suits the method. It evolved as an understory tree in tropical rainforests and does well in partial shade. On Anitu’s farm, the bananas and fruit trees grown alongside the cacao also add harvests and income while the slower-growing trees mature. This answers one of the hardest problems in forest restoration: how to pay the bills while waiting for a forest to grow.
Adding value, reducing waste
Anitu’s product range includes dark and flavoured chocolate bars, tablea for traditional sikwate, and a trail mix of cacao nibs, peanuts, raisins and muscovado sugar. Each one lets the farm keep more of the value of its harvest instead of selling raw beans at commodity prices.
The founders say circular thinking was part of the business before anyone gave it a name. For Rogen, it comes down to the economics of rural life.
“It is very important for us, especially now that there is inflation,” Rogen said. “In our community, if we want to survive, we really need to know how to reuse, reduce, and recycle.”
Marvi sees it as more than a survival tactic. “The time will come when this will truly be a necessity,” Marvi said.
“It is not just for show or a passing trend. It really has to become a way of life.”
In Cebuano, Marvi put it more bluntly: “Dili siya ingon nga char-char”, meaning it is not just for show.
Their newest product came from that thinking. Every cacao pod holds its beans in a sweet, white pulp. Chocolate makers usually let it drain off during fermentation or throw it away. The Montecillos watched pulp from each harvest go to waste and felt it was too good to lose. They started looking for a way to save it.
The answer was cacao juice. The juice is bright and tangy, and its flavour is often compared to guyabano (soursop). Anitu tested it with customers first to see whether people would buy a drink most had never tried. The response showed there was demand. Pulp that was once discarded now has a market.
The juice has one catch: it doesn’t last. The pulp is rich in natural sugars and starts fermenting soon after extraction, so it has to be sold and drunk quickly. For now, that limits how far Anitu can ship it and how much it can make. Extending the juice’s shelf life without losing its fresh flavour is now one of the enterprise’s main goals. Solving it could turn a seasonal novelty into a reliable second income from every harvest.
The Circulab journey
In 2026, Anitu was selected for the first cohort of Circulab: Accelerating Circular Innovation from the Ground Up, Mindanao’s first accelerator for circular economy enterprises. Upgrade Innolab Inc. implements the program. Funding comes through the European Union–Philippines Green Economy Programme, under the Green Up to Scale Up initiative managed by Expertise France. Circulab launched on June 2, 2026, and runs for nine months. It offers startups and MSMEs across Mindanao business development support, technical mentoring and market linkages, along with grants.
Circulab’s thesis matches Anitu’s: Mindanao’s agricultural and industrial waste streams are business opportunities waiting to be designed. The program aims to create 1,000 green jobs and set up at least ten circular economy pilot projects with local governments and communities.
Anitu received a ₱800,000 grant for a project titled Scaling a Solar-Powered Circular Cacao Enterprise through Regenerative Production and Cacao Juice Upcycling. It runs from September 2026 to March 2027 and has four parts, one for each link in the chain from farm to shelf.
Fixing the factory. The first step is the solar-powered processing facility in New Kidapawan. Under the plan, its leaking roof and worn fixtures are repaired and the building is upgraded to meet Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards. The repairs create three local green jobs. Juice-making also moves beyond manual work: Anitu is buying a stainless-steel cacao juice extractor, food-grade trays and storage containers, and bottling supplies. Four products will go through nutrition facts analysis and chemical and microbiological testing, then be submitted to the FDA, with the facility inspected. For a perishable drink like cacao juice, that lab work is the starting point for understanding how long it stays safe and how to make it last longer.
Tending the forest. The second part goes back to the farm. Anitu is buying biomass management machinery and farm tools to handle the pruning that syntropic farming depends on. That means turning cut branches and leaves into mulch and soil instead of waste. The equipment will support a demonstration site, an expansion of one to two hectares, and upkeep of the nine hectares already under cultivation. The demonstration site brings the couple closer to their goal of making the farm a place where other growers can learn.
Growing with neighbours. Anitu doesn’t plan to grow alone. The third part builds a local supply network. Over the project, Anitu will source about 1,700 kilograms of wet cacao beans from regenerative and agroforestry farmer partners nearby, along with cacao butter, sugar, coffee and other ingredients. That way, part of the value of each chocolate bar stays with other farming families in the area.
Getting to market. The last part prepares the products to sell. Anitu is producing 6,000 premium chocolate boxes, 2,000 stand-up pouches for its tablea and trail mix, and 500 refillable 150-millilitre bottles for cacao juice. The reusable bottles carry the circular idea into the packaging.
Together, these steps take Anitu from a family operation built on improvisation toward a certified, market-ready enterprise. For the Montecillos, the accelerator is a chance to turn practices they already follow into a business that can scale.
The long game
Anitu’s model is easy to admire and hard to run. Forest restoration happens over decades. A small chocolate business has to manage costs, keep quality consistent and meet demand every month. Bukidnon is far from the country’s main consumer markets, which makes distribution and visibility constant challenges.
If the model works, it reaches beyond one farm. The Philippines imports most of the cacao it consumes, and Mindanao grows almost all of what the country produces. Farms that add value locally, share it with neighbouring growers, and restore the land while doing it could change how the island takes part in a US$130-billion industry.
From a two-hectare experiment in Kibawe, the Montecillos are betting that the most valuable thing their farm makes is the forest itself, and that the chocolate can pay for it.
