Become a Fortunato Word of Mouth Partner
Want to earn money by referring us to your friends, meanwhile, supporting the cacao growers association of the district of Huarango Peru?
Become a word of mouth partner of Fortunato Chocolate!
In order to become a word of mouth partner of Fortunato Chocolate, you will need to apply, here is the link to our application page:
(You earn 6% of referred orders, and 6% will go to the cacao growers association of the district of Huarango.)
If you'd prefer to forgo your commission, and send the entire 12% to cacao farmers in Huarango, please use this application:
If you are already a partner, you can log in here:
In order you qualify for the program you must:
- Have spent $100 or more with Fortunato Chocolate.
- Have a PayPal account, so we can pay you for your referrals!
Some things to note about the program:
- Once you apply, we will look over the application, if you are approved you will receive an email with further instructions. (Check your spam folder, if you haven't received the email within a day or two, if you still don't see it, please send us an email.)
- If your application is approved you will receive a personal referral link, as well as a personal dashboard where you can view your referral analytics and past payouts.
- You will earn 6% of referred orders, and 6% will go to the cacao growers association of the district of Huarango. Unless you chose to forgo your commission, and send the entire 12% to cacao farmers in Huarango.
To learn more about the program, please read Adam's newsletter that was sent out to all our newsletter subscribers on April 19th, 2023:
Hello and good day!
Over the last two and a half years, we’ve grown our chocolate business mostly on the back of advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
We’ve also opened retail stores.
In 2020 when the pandemic hit, restaurants and chocolatiers were getting shut down all over the world and we were on the verge of going under.
Prior to 2020, we’d never sold any chocolate directly to the public.
Our entire clientele was restaurants and chocolatiers.
In a final desperate pivot, I took a course on Facebook advertising, and we launched an e-commerce business.
Thankfully it worked, and we were still around and thriving.
We’d been building the business for twelve and a half years.
It would have been a heartbreaking shame to see it come to an end after so much hard work and sacrifice.
Based on the success of the ecommerce business, we’ve been able to build out a production kitchen to manufacture new products, and we’ve been able to open our retail stores.
For all that, we must be extremely thankful that Facebook and Instagram advertising were available as a resource for us to tap into.
But times change.
Sometimes you have to get away from the day-to-day grind to really see things clearly.
That is happening for me in Peru.
I have several jobs within our company, perhaps the most important of which is marketing.
Because we only use one type of cacao in all our chocolate, pure Nacional cacao, grown in the district of Huarango in northern Peru, our growth is inherently limited.
The cacao supply increases at roughly 15% per year as cacao farmers plant out pure Nacional from our clone garden.
That means that the maximum our company can grow is around 15% per year.
This is why we can’t open a million retail locations or franchise or be a very fast growth company.
We have a good model for it, but it would require us to use additional sources of cacao.
But if we did that, we wouldn’t be Fortunato Chocolate, and we’d rather be ourselves, grow at a reasonable click, and do high quality work.
Our model has always been to cut players out of the supply chain.
This is the key factor that lets us pay our cacao farmers extremely high prices for their cacao, on average about 10 times FairTrade premiums.
On the other end, we sell direct to our customers, either through our website or our retail shops.
You’ll never find any of our products being offered by somebody other than us.
Our products are only available directly from the source.
As a result of that, we can offer fair prices for a very high-quality product, while still paying our cacao farm partners high prices.
We are pioneers of this model in the chocolate industry, and we are proud of it.
By buying cacao direct and maintaining ownership through the chocolate production process, we cut out about 6 markups.
By selling direct, we cut out distributor and retailer markups.
This all contributes to our pricing and what we can do for cacao farmers.
During this trip, I’ve been trying to think about how we can do even more.
What is another way for us to innovate on our model?
Where is there even more money for us to give back to our customers and cacao farm partners?
How can we squeeze out even more middlemen from this process?
As I was walking through a beautiful valley with my family, with big green mountains on either side of us, and thick clouds covering the peaks, and droplets of mist lightly sprinkling on my face, it hit me.
We spend a fair amount of money on advertising, making sure that we can accommodate the growth in production each year.
It is a big line item in our budget.
And it is a profitable line item.
We’ve become quite good at advertising over the last couple of years.
Each year, we know for certain that we can buy and sell the cacao production because of our ability to attract new customers through advertising.
But it no longer jives with who we want to become.
We’re driven by three primary goals.
Support our cacao farm partners by buying increasing quantities of cacao at the highest possible prices.
Offer the best chocolate we can possibly make at surprisingly affordable prices.
Do everything we can to make our wonderful customers happy.
Given those three goals and given that I am in charge of the company’s marketing, I am going to change the way we do our marketing going forward.
Over the next month, I am going to completely suspend our Facebook and Instagram paid advertising.
This will be a permanent change in the way we do things.
This is a big risk, because it means leaving behind a thing we know how to do well and staking our business on an unknown and untested approach.
But if we are going to fully embrace our goals, we must not be afraid of taking risks.
So here is our innovation.
Going forward, we are going to be strictly a word-of-mouth company, entirely dependent on our customers to help us spread the word.
Here is how it will work.
I am going to work with our technical team to develop an easy way for our customers to sign up for our word-of-mouth program.
You will only be able to sign up if you have spent $100 or more with us on chocolate in the past.
This is not a business opportunity for strangers.
It is only for real customers who appreciate our chocolate and want to be a part of the ongoing journey.
Customers who sign up for the program will get a sharable link that will allow us to track the sales generated from your referrals.
For anybody who purchases through your link, we’ll pay you a 6% sales commission.
And this is not a one-time thing. We’ll pay you 6% every time somebody buys through your link.
Just ask your friends to always buy through your link and you’ll generate a commission every time.
But that isn’t all.
For every sale through your link, we’ll also send a matching amount, an additional 6%, to the cacao growers association of the district of Huarango.
The cacao growers association can use this money however they see fit to support the cacao growing community.
The money could be used for repairing roads and building bridges, buying medicine for those in need, constructing buildings to support our future agrotourism initiatives, etc.
Each month, we’ll wire the sales commissions to your bank account and we’ll also send you a report letting you know how much we are sending to the District of Huarango on your behalf.
By doing this, we cut out Meta from our business altogether.
We hopefully bind our customers ever more closely to our cacao farm partners, which has always been one of our passions.
And we make ourselves even more dependent on our customers, which means we must serve you well if we are to succeed as a business.
Also, for those who are looking to make a little extra money on the side, all you have to do is tell your chocolate loving friends about our company and email a link.
I believe that this will allow us to send tens of thousands of extra dollars per month out to the district of Huarango and this amount will make a huge impact.
Better for our customers and cacao farm partners to get this money than Mark Zuckerberg.
Anyhow, that is what I wanted to let you know about.
We’ll be launching this full steam within the next month and from there, we will be a completely word-of-mouth driven company.
Thank you so much for your time today.