This chocolate-lovers design was created as a collaboration with iconic American kitchen and food brand Williams Sonoma. 

My goal for this collaboration with Williams Sonoma was to depict the complex web of life surrounding the crop that gives us chocolate, Theobroma cacao. No species exists in isolation and the “food of the gods” is grown best in natural agroforestry systems, where diverse trees provide shade and fallen leaves create microhabitats, enabling a great multitude of species to thrive.

The design celebrates the Cocoa & Forests Initiative which is all about this approach: agroforestry, environmental stewardship and the prevention of deforestation.

The many details in this design together signify the web of life in which cacao can thrive. From the pods and tiny flowers themselves to the delicately-patterned red cracker butterfly flits in a shaft of sunlight, observed by its main predator, a small but fierce bird called the rufous-tailed jacamar.

The design highlights some of the many species with which Theobroma cacao is interconnected in mixed agroforestry systems. For example, there are the cocoa pods with their variable colours, the leaves in all stages including fallen on the forest floor, the tiny flowers, and fictional flowers as symbolic representation of the pollinators. Many other species fly about like the rufus-tailed jacamar, the rufus vented chachalaca, the red cracker and blushing phantom butterflies. On the forest floor we have the dotted reed frog, ringed caecilian, leaf-footed Corrie bug and the elegant fern, Asplenium cuspidatum. A web of diverse life.