How We Chose Our New Name "embue"

Pronounced /em’bju/

Since changing our name on August 23rd, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about why the new name and what it means. So here’s a window into our journey of arriving at embue cacao!

After almost 11 years with our original name, “Heartblood Cacao”, the decision to change our name was a huge one! So much has changed since we founded this company, and yet through that time, our mission to share the love that we experience with cacao has never waned. In fact, we feel it’s more important than ever with everything going on in the world. We truly need more heart-centered growth in our personal and collective lives. 

Back in our early days, most people had never heard of ceremonial cacao, nor a cacao ceremony (a “cow ceremony?” they would ask, puzzled!). In the time since then, this medicine has spread like wildfire, primarily in our experience, because cacao itself wants to return to us and help us remember the magic and love that is possible. 

As we came to realize the wider potential of this medicine for heart-centered change on a scale we couldn’t have imagined when we began, we started to see the need to take our game to the next level. Cacao has always taught us to embody our mission and potential as fully as possible, and the old name and branding wasn’t cutting it anymore. So what began as, “let’s redo our packaging”, turned into a year-long process of diving deeply into our mission, your feedback, and our vision for sharing this beautiful plant as widely as possible. 

Through that process, we realized that the name “Heartblood Cacao” was no longer serving us as it had in the first 10 years. We needed a new organizing concept to express the love we have for this plant medicine. As you can imagine, opening that door was both challenging and exciting, leaving many possible directions to go and knowing that it was a bold move to overhaul what we had all gotten used to!

One of the core teachings of cacao is the relationship we develop with it when we approach it with reverence and an understanding that we are working with an essence, spirit or energy that responds to us. This relationship can support us in many different ways, but requires us to know deeply that our intentions have an impact, and that the cacao itself is in turn impacting us. That we imbue the cacao with our intentions, and that the cacao in turn imbues us with it’s medicine. 

To imbue means: 

• to inspire or permeate with (a feeling, idea or quality)
• to permeate or influence as if by dyeing
• to tinge or dye deeply

This idea of infusing the cacao, or the cacao infusing us, resonated on a deep level. It went beyond just the heart-centered focus of our old name, and to the core of what it means to work with plant medicines in general, and the versatile, unconditional loving nature of cacao specifically. 

We had also been playing around with various prefixes to common words to come up with something unique, and came across “em”. As in “embody”, “empower” or “embrace”. It means "put in or into, bring to a certain state”. It brings us into a fuller connection to the word. So we put the two together, and got: 

We love the soft, gentle feeling of the word as we speak it. We love the symmetry and simplicity of how it looks. We love the felt sense of magic we get in saying it. All of which are what we love about cacao! 

Once we had decided on the new name and gotten back around to packaging, we had the opportunity to do something more with our classic 1lb Ceremonial Cacao Bar. We already loved the shape and size of it, but wanted to infuse it with something more. Since our new name captured the essence of cacao so well, we decided that was the perfect reminder right there on the bar. So each time you take it out and prepare your cacao, it’s a reminder to slow down, connect with your intentions and with the medicine that is cacao. 

When we reflect on why we started all of this in the first place, where we’re headed, and the impact we want to have, it energizes us to imagine that we are embuing the world with more loving connection. We want that love we feel to permeate and inspire everything we do!

We hope you love our new name as much as we do, and that it serves as a reminder to what is possible with this magical plant medicine we call ceremonial cacao!