Conscious Consumerism

Conscious consumerism usually gets framed as a buyer’s job, picking the right brand off the shelf and feeling good about it. But Danielle, who grows ceremonial cacao on her own land in Colombia, flips that whole idea on its head. We treat growth as the only sane goal, more sales, more reach, more, and she keeps being offered exactly that, partners who will triple her sales, and she keeps saying no. Talking to her reframed conscious consumerism for me entirely, and not in the way I expected.

In our interview, I asked Danielle what conscious or ethical consumerism meant to her. She spoke about enough, about the operation she wanted to run and about the life she wanted around it.

Conscious consumerism is about what you let into your whole system

She started not with what to buy, but with what it does to you.

“I think it’s more about making a choice as to what you want in your system on a daily basis,” Danielle said. “Your whole system, your physical body, your emotional body, your spiritual body. When you eat an apple that was mass produced, mistreated, sprayed with chemicals, stored, hauled all over the place, how is that energy really sustaining in your system?”

For her it is all connected. “Our spiritual bodies and our emotional bodies and our physical bodies are all connected,” she said. “So if one is out of balance, they’re all going to be out of balance.” And it is not only food. “This pertains to the energies we allow into our systems every day. The people we interact with, the movies we watch, the music we listen to, how much programming and billboards. All of this affects our whole system.”

Danielle also expressed scepticism about organic labelling and the substances it could permit. That was her criticism of the label, rather than a finding that organic certification is fraudulent. Her wider point was to pay attention to the choices behind what she consumed.

She turned down the offers to make Origen huge

Danielle described offers to expand the business and explained why she was not keen to accept them.

“People are all the time writing me, hey, if you want to partner up, I can be your strategic partner, I can do the marketing, you can distribute here, we can increase your sales three times,” Danielle said. “I’m like, yeah, but then how does that change my life? Maybe it’s good for the farmers, they do way more, and I would love to support them more. But also my little beautiful operation turns into a huge operation, and I want to enjoy my life.”

She has run the maths on growth and found it empty. “To expand any further than what we are, oh my God, I’d have to work twice as much, I’d have to bring in ten more workers, and then I’d have to sell five times as much just to cover all these things. And at the end of the day, yes, more people got beautiful cacao, but then what?”

She even admits the guilt of it. “Sometimes I feel really selfish,” she said. But she has made peace with the boundary. This is the same grower who told me she would rather walk around and talk to her trees and her rocks and her chickens than chase another distribution deal, the story we open the mother post with.

The fisherman who already had enough

She reached for an old allegory, and it landed.

“There’s this fisherman who lived on a little island with his family,” Danielle said. “He’d go every day to the coast and fish, which was enough for him and his family, the most beautiful fish in the world. And one day an executive businessman on vacation tasted the fish. Oh man, this is the best fish I’ve ever had, there should be more of this in the world.”

The businessman starts optimising him. Get another net, twice the fish. Then a boat, then a bigger boat, then a fleet, then workers. “And the fisherman’s listening,” she said, “like, so you want me to get more equipment, more people, more workers, do all of this stuff. At the end of the day, what do I get? I’m happy, I have my fish, I have my family, I have enough. So your idea is that you want me to stress out and work so hard for ten years to build this empire, just so I could do what I’m already doing right now and retire?”

That is the whole trap of growth in one story. “I think we need to think about that,” Danielle said. “What is enough in our lives? What do we really need, and what fulfils us?”

What happens when a beautiful thing outgrows its intention

She has watched the alternative play out, and it is a cautionary tale.

Danielle also raised a concern about a business growing beyond the purpose its founder intended. She illustrated that concern with her account of another cacao business. We did not independently establish that business’s history or commercial model, so I would keep the useful question general: what happens to the intention behind a small operation when it expands?

For Danielle, the question was whether growth still served the life and work she wanted. Her answer was a personal boundary, rather than a judgement that every larger business had lost its purpose.

I understood this as Danielle’s concern about growth, rather than a rule that all expansion destroys what makes a business worthwhile.

What you can take from a grower who chose enough

Here is the takeaway, and it is for your life as much as your shopping. Conscious consumerism, the way Danielle lives it, is not mostly about scrutinising labels at the till. It is about asking what is actually enough, and then refusing to be pushed past it, whether you are a grower turning down a distributor or a shopper resisting the next thing you do not need.

Supporting a maker who chooses to stay small can support the kind of work you value. Size alone does not prove a product’s quality, working conditions or environmental performance. What interested me was that Danielle had considered the offers and decided what she wanted her own operation to become.

You can support a brand that deliberately stayed small through the Origen listing, and find others who chose the same path on our ethical chocolate list.