Dalareich Chocolate House

Overview

Dalareich Chocolate House is Bohol’s first dedicated bean-to-bar chocolate factory, in Barangay Booy, Tagbilaran City. The business descends from Dalareich Food Products, a family enterprise Ricardo and Mrs. Polot started in 1994 with their daughter Dalareich. They began by producing tableya — unsweetened chocolate tablets used for hot chocolate — from just 5 kilograms of cacao beans, not enough to support a household of seven.

The turning point came in 2014, when Dalareich Polot won a scholarship to the Cacaolab at Ghent University in Belgium and trained under professional chocolate makers there. Back in Bohol, she launched Ginto Chocolates, a social enterprise sourcing cacao exclusively from smallholder farmers in the province’s interior municipalities. The Dalareich Chocolate House opened as a combined factory and retail space in 2017, letting visitors watch the full production run from raw cacao to finished bar.

In 2019 the chocolate house won a Gold Award at London’s Academy of Chocolate Awards — the first Bohol producer to take that recognition.

Location

Barangay Booy, Tagbilaran City, approximately 2 kilometres north of the city centre along the coastal road toward Manga. The facility is both a production factory and a retail and experience space.

Getting There

From central Tagbilaran City (port area or city hall): tricycle or habal-habal to Barangay Booy, approximately 10–15 minutes. Booy is on the coastal road north of the city. Most visitors travelling between Tagbilaran and Talibon pass through the area.

Practical Info

Two named workshop formats are confirmed via the operator’s own site: a “Heritage Tableya Making Experience” and a “Make Your Own Chocolate Bar” workshop, both requiring a minimum of 4 participants. [FACT NEEDED: confirmed operating hours and days, entrance fee for factory tour, per-person workshop pricing.] The facility offers chocolate-making workshops and group events in addition to retail sales. Products include unsweetened drinking chocolate, tableya, milk chocolate bars, and muscovado-coated cacao nibs.

What to Expect

A working chocolate factory with a retail counter and tasting area. The production line — roasting, cracking, conching, tempering, moulding — runs on cacao sourced from Bohol farmers under the “Adopt a Cacao Tree” programme, which also works to rehabilitate heirloom cacao varieties that had largely dropped out of local cultivation. Family-run chocolate workshops are available; book ahead for groups.

The social enterprise structure routes purchase prices back to farmer income directly rather than through a middleman buyer, and that farm-gate relationship is central to how the brand presents itself on-site — this isn’t chocolate branded around Bohol, it’s chocolate that traces to a named grower.

Notes

Source: 03-staging/_bohol-philippines-entities/attractions/dalareich-chocolate-house.md (BPTO Table 11, Bohol Tourism Profile Eco Dev2025). Academy of Chocolate Gold Award: 2019. Cacaolab scholarship: 2014. Factory opened: 2017. Workshop names per Dalareich Chocolate House, official site, accessed 2026-07-17 — self-described as “the first and only chocolate factory in Bohol.” [FACT NEEDED: confirmed street address, current hours, workshop pricing]