Sebastian Cisneros
Cloudforest Chocolate | Portland, OR
APRIL 2018
As a child, Sebastian Cisneros’ parents drove him through the lowlands outside Quito, Ecuador, to see where cacao grew. The sent of it wafting into the car has stayed with Cisneros to this day, 4,000 miles away in his adopted home of Portland, Oregon. Cisneros arrived in Oregon as a high school exchange student and graduated from University of Oregon with a degree in economics. But he was missing a connection to home.
In 2007, Cisneros jumped right into chocolate after meeting future mentors Aubrey Lindley and Jesse Mannism, owners of Cacao, an artisan chocolate shop. At Cacao, Cisneros dedicated five years to learning cacao sourcing and chocolate production. Eventually, the urge to make his own bar was too much to resist. In 2009, Cisneros made his first beanto-bar chocolate, Cloudforest, with Ecuadorian cacao and cane sugar. He called his nascent operation Cocanú.
Cisneros builds flavors from life experience, as with his Valentina bar, named for his daughter and made with maple sugar to represent her Canadian mother and Ecuadorian cacao for her father. Cisneros lives in two worlds of chocolate: purist and experimental. In the latter, he experiments with sweeteners, white chocolates, and infusions like sesame, cardamom, and palo santo wood. In November 2018, Cisneros will relaunch Cocanú as Cloudforest, with a new location, larger team, a café, and a ramped-up retail operation.
