My name is María Mancini Cenobio. I’m a mama to twin girls Maya and Ana and we live in St. Marys, Ontario, where I make chocolate from the bean.

I grew up in Mexico, in the land of the Aztec civilization, near the pyramids of Teotihuacan. Chocolate has always been part of my culture and traditions. Prepared and drunk the way it had been for thousands of years before it ever became a candy bar.

Years later I was living in Canada, shopping in health food stores in Montreal, looking for cacao to make a proper cup of hot chocolate with adaptogenic herbs. I found cacao paste in bulk from Peru and from Ecuador. Nothing from Mexico. Nothing from the country with four thousand years of cacao history behind it, and none of the chocolate I had grown up with.

So I began making it myself. MAYANA® opened as a cacao bar in Toronto in 2017, with Drinking Chocolate blends I designed and had made for me in Mexico, working directly with the chocolate maker and the farming family who grew the beans. Years of experimenting with cacao and superfoods followed, guided in part by what I learned from my partner about nutrition and growing organic, nutrient-dense food, and in 2022 I earned my certification as a Chocolate Maker and began doing the entire process myself, from the bean, in my own facility.

Today MAYANA® cacao is made from bean to cup, using all my senses to fine-tune every batch. The cacao comes from one family farm in Soconusco, Chiapas, a region where cacao has been cultivated for millennia and where chocolate was first made by the Mokaya people.

Cacao in its purest form carries more than flavour. It carries history, identity, and deep-rooted wisdom. Most of what we call “hot chocolate” today is stripped of its essence, diluted, and disconnected from its origins. When you sip MAYANA® cacao you are not just tasting chocolate; you are experiencing connection, care, and a supply chain that honours every hand that touched it. It is chocolate the way it was meant to be: authentic, sustainable and deeply nourishing.