It was a Monday morning. My first cup of cacao was finished, and I opened my inbox to see what the day held.
There was an email from the Nourish Awards.
I read it standing up, which tells you something. Golden Focus, our Lion’s Mane and ceremonial cacao blend, had been awarded 3 stars in the 2026 UK Nourish Awards. It is the first award Herbal Cacao has ever received, in all the years I have been doing this.
I want to tell you what that actually means. Not the celebration part, though there was some of that. The real part. Because “award-winning” is a phrase that gets used so freely in the wellness world that it has started to mean almost nothing, and if I am going to put a badge on our packaging, you deserve to know exactly what is behind it.
What the Nourish Awards Actually Are
The Nourish Awards are an independent evaluation programme for food, drink, supplements and natural skincare. They run chapters in the UK and the USA, and they exist for one reason: to give people a way to tell which products genuinely hold up when someone qualified looks closely at them.
That last part is what makes them different from most of what you see on a shelf.
Who sits on the judging panel
The panel is made up of qualified, practising nutrition professionals. Registered nutritionists, registered dietitians and specialist experts, bringing clinical and research expertise to every evaluation. More than fifty judges take part each year.
These are people who spend their working lives reading ingredient labels with a critical eye. They are not journalists, they are not influencers, and they are not a marketing panel. They are the kind of people many of us go to for advice.
How the products are judged
This is the part I respect most. The judging is hands on. The panel does not sit with a stack of paperwork and score our marketing copy. They receive the actual product, and they use it.
For food and drink that means preparing it and tasting it. Texture, aroma, flavour, how it behaves in the cup. Alongside that they assess nutritional value, the quality and integrity of the ingredients, and whether the functional claims a brand makes are actually supported by what is inside.
We sent them two 100g discs of Golden Focus in May. Then we waited four months, and heard nothing, which is exactly how it should be.
What the categories cover
There are three main categories: Food and Drink, Supplements, and Beauty and Skincare. Golden Focus was entered in Food and Drink.
In the 2026 UK round the judges examined 560 products from more than 15 countries. Ours was one of them.
What the Stars Mean, and What They Don’t
Products that meet the Nourish standard receive a star level with their award. Golden Focus received 3 stars: Nourish Exceptional, the highest of the three levels, awarded only to products demonstrating genuine innovation and outstanding nutritional quality. It scored 94%.
In the judges’ words: “A wonderful and ethical cacao blend featuring innovative ingredients and a delicious flavour.”
Now, the more important half of this section. Here is what this award is not, and I would rather say it myself than have you wonder.
It is not a certification. Our organic certification through Skal and our independent lab testing follow completely different processes. An award is an evaluation and an opinion, given by qualified people at one moment in time.
It is an independent confirmation from people with no stake in our success that the thing we make is what we say it is. In an industry this loosely regulated, that is not a small thing.
Why This One Landed So Deeply for Me
I studied nutrition. That detail sits in my history and most people who buy our cacao would have no reason to know it.
I left the Netherlands at eighteen and spent years moving: London for more than a decade, then Africa, the Himalayas, then three years in Mexico living close to Indigenous Maya culture, where I met cacao properly for the first time. Not as chocolate. As medicine, as ceremony, as a way of coming back into the heart. Somewhere along that path I also sat down and studied nutrition formally, because I wanted to understand the physical side of what I was feeling.
So there is a particular circularity in a panel of practising nutrition professionals being the ones to look at our blend and say yes. Those are my people. That is the training I went and got, in the years before Herbal Cacao existed, because I wanted to be able to tell the difference between something that genuinely nourishes and something that is simply marketed beautifully.
Nutrition has never been a side note for us. From the very beginning I did not want to simply sell cacao. I wanted to supercharge the cup. To take something already sacred and then ask what else Mother Nature has offered us that truly belongs alongside it. Lion’s Mane. Herbs and roots that people have been reaching for across generations. Not because they look good on a label, but because they earn their place in the cup.
What I was reaching for was a product with real impact, in every direction at once. Ethical and socially responsible, yes, in how it is grown and who is paid properly for it. Spiritual, yes, in how it meets you when you finally sit down with it. But also nourishing, in the plainest and most physical sense of that word. Something that nourishes the body as well as the heart and the mind.
There is so much sold as wellness that is really a snack with sugar added for the taste buds, wearing beautiful packaging. I did not want to make that. I wanted something delicious, because a ritual you do not enjoy is a ritual you quietly abandon, and something made with real care for the body receiving it.
When I built Golden Focus I was not designing it to score well. I was making the cup I wanted at my own kitchen table, on a morning when I wanted to slow down and let my heart lead. Then people trained to look for nourishment looked at that same cup and said yes.
Body, mind and soul, in one cup.
What the Judges Were Actually Looking At
If you have never read our ingredient list closely, here is what was in front of that panel.
Single origin ceremonial cacao from Alta Verapaz
Our cacao comes from Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, grown in rainforest conditions, minimally processed and never roasted at high temperatures. Single origin, not blended from whatever was available that season.
That matters more than it sounds. Cacao is a plant that draws readily from the soil it grows in, which means everything in that soil ends up in your cup. We publish our independent lab results for exactly this reason: no pesticides, heavy metals within safe limits, microbial safety confirmed.
Lion’s Mane
The Lion’s Mane in Golden Focus is a dual extract. It is not powdered mycelium grown on grain, which is what a large share of the mushroom products on the market actually contain. Extraction method and sourcing are precisely the kind of detail a nutrition professional checks and a casual buyer never sees.
Traditional Maya spices, and what we leave out
The blend is finished with traditional Maya spices. There is no cane sugar, no filler, no flavouring, no anti-caking agent, nothing added to make it cheaper to produce or easier to sell.
When you put a product in front of judges who read labels for a living, what you left out is examined as carefully as what you put in.
Why Independent Evaluation Matters So Much in This Industry
Ceremonial cacao is a beautiful term with no legal definition behind it. Anyone can print it on a bag. I have watched the phrase spread across this market for years now, attached to products that have been roasted hard, cut with sugar, sourced through three anonymous middlemen, and sold with a photograph of a rainforest.
There is no regulator checking that. Which leaves customers in an impossible position, trying to tell the difference between two bags that make identical promises.
If you want to know what makes cacao ceremonial, when a label alone cannot tell you, we have written about that separately.
So we do the only thing we can do. We test independently and publish the results. We name our origins. We keep our relationships with the families who grow for us direct, and we say who they are. And when an independent panel offers to look closely at what we make, we send them the product and accept whatever comes back.
The award is not the point. The willingness to be examined is the point. The award is just what happened afterwards.
This Belongs to the Families Who Grow It
I need to say this clearly, because it would be easy to let a badge become a story about a brand.
None of this exists without the cacao itself, and the cacao does not exist without the people who tend it. Our sourcing relationships in Guatemala and Belize are relationships, built over years, not transactions arranged by email. We pay 125% above the market rate through our Reciprocity Program, because paying the market rate for something sacred has never sat right with me, and because the market rate is a number set a very long way from the people doing the work.
A panel in the UK tasted our cacao and found it exceptional. What they were tasting was soil, climate, care, and generations of knowledge held by families who have been doing this far longer than any of us.
If you want to see where that goes, our give back to the source initiative is the clearest place to start.
What Happens Now
You will start seeing the Nourish badge appear. On the Golden Focus product page, on the packaging when the next production run comes through, and across our channels as we share the news. The badge is ours to carry from September 2026 until January 2029.
Behind that small mark are 560 products, more than 15 countries, a panel of qualified nutrition professionals, and one blend made at a kitchen table by someone who wanted her morning cup to mean something.
Thank you for being part of this. Every cup you have made with us is somewhere inside that recognition.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the Nourish Awards?
The Nourish Awards are an independent awards programme for food, drink, supplements and natural skincare, running chapters in the UK and the USA. Products are evaluated by a panel of qualified nutrition professionals rather than by journalists or a marketing panel.
Who judges the Nourish Awards?
The panel is made up of more than fifty judges each year: qualified, practising nutrition professionals including registered nutritionists, registered dietitians and specialist experts. Judges have no commercial relationship with the brands they evaluate.
How are products actually evaluated?
Judging is hands on. Judges receive the physical product and use it. For food and drink this means preparing and tasting it, assessing flavour and texture alongside nutritional value, ingredient quality and whether a product’s functional claims hold up.
What does a 3 star Nourish Award mean?
3 stars, Nourish Exceptional, is the highest of the Nourish Awards’ three levels, above Nourish Recommended (1 star) and Nourish Excellence (2 stars). It is awarded only to products demonstrating genuine innovation and outstanding nutritional quality. Golden Focus scored 94%.
Does the award mean Golden Focus has health benefits?
No, and we would never present it that way. The award reflects the quality, ingredient integrity and sensory character of the product as assessed by qualified professionals. It is not a health claim and it is not a medical endorsement.
Which Herbal Cacao product won the award?
Golden Focus, our Lion’s Mane and ceremonial cacao blend, made with single origin cacao from Alta Verapaz in Guatemala. It is available as a 100g disc and as a 500g block.
Is ceremonial cacao independently tested?
There is no legal definition of “ceremonial cacao” and no regulator checking the term, so independent testing is entirely voluntary. We publish our own independent lab results covering pesticides, heavy metals and microbial safety, and we would encourage you to ask any cacao brand for theirs.
With love,
Sharon ♡ Founder and Vision Holder, Herbal Cacao
Please share this article with anyone you think would benefit from reading it.
