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Our Story
The name is a direct reference to Mauritius, the island nation where LCDI's founder was born. The company is a product of that origin in more than name: an island sensibility, a comfort with distance, and a willingness to travel to find what is genuinely worth finding.
Ravi Goojha spent decades as a UN diplomat, working with governments through humanitarian missions across South America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq, and parts of Africa — moving between countries in various states of rupture. In Cap-Haïtien that afternoon, he was not in a market researching the chocolate industry. He was doing his job. What he tasted changed the direction of the years that followed.
What began as a single encounter in a Haitian market became nine years of systematic research across cacao-producing regions. Not desk research — field research. Time spent at cooperatives, tasting across harvests, learning what distinguishes a Premier Cru lot from everything produced around it, and building the supplier relationships that make LCDI possible.
Five cooperative origins across four continents: Haiti, Belize, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Bali. Each one reached not through a commodity broker but through direct field contact. Each one selected because the beans, tasted at origin, were the best available in that region at that time.
The term Premier Cru comes from French wine classification — it designates not just a region but the best lots within a region, selected for their specific character. LCDI applies the same logic to cacao. Single-origin means one country. Premier Cru means the specific cooperative harvest lot within that country that passed a tasting standard before any purchase was made.
Every LCDI bar begins with that standard. It is why there are only five origins rather than fifty. Selection takes time. Relationships take years. The result is chocolate that tastes like the place it came from — because every other decision along the way was made in service of that.
Cacao and sugar. The decision to make chocolate from two ingredients and nothing else is not a marketing position. It is a statement about what chocolate actually is: a product of the bean, the soil, the fermentation, and the craft of the maker. Cocoa butter, lecithin, vanilla, and emulsifiers exist in most chocolate because they are cheaper than quality. They are absent from LCDI chocolate because quality is the point.
LCDI is manufactured in Central Islip, New York. Bean-to-bar means exactly that: from the raw cacao bean to the finished bar, every step of production happens in the same facility under direct oversight. No outsourced conching, no bought-in couverture, no third-party manufacturing. The control over the process is what makes the Premier Cru standard deliverable at scale.