How the team at CACAO scour the world for the best flavour combinations and share them with café owners across Australia in the form of artisan macarons.
The duo of chefs behind CACAO live and work in the world of flavour. No family holiday or meal with friends is safe from being a springboard for ideas for the next flavour combination to join the brand’s collection of hand-crafted macarons, destined to be enjoyed alongside quality coffee by café goers across Australia.
Directors Laurent Meric and Tim Clark, both former Michelin-starred pastry chefs, take recipe development very seriously. There are no artificial flavourings to be found in the CACAO kitchen in Cheltenham, Melbourne, just the finest quality ingredients the team can get their hands on.
“A macaron has few ingredients yet there’s a very fine balance to get it right, so choosing the best quality ingredients is paramount,” says Tim.
“Therefore, we start with creating the flavour we want to distil from scratch. For example, if we’re crafting a lemon meringue macaron, we won’t just add lemon flavouring. We’ll bake a lemon meringue pie and work out how to capture the whole eating experience to ensure the customer can taste the soft flavours of meringue and the texture of the short-crust pastry.”
CACAO’s new product development (NPD) team meet regularly to come up with fresh flavours to keep the range relevant. Innovation is key, so they’ll consider what’s selling well, international flavour trends, and customer feedback.
“We source inspiration from around the world – from the seasons, art, anything that compels us to be creative, it might not even be food related,” says Tim.
“We like to do things differently from the mainstream, so we’re often at the forefront of flavour. It’s not unusual for us to develop a new flavour profile and then six to 12 months later see the big manufacturers reproducing our unique combination.”
Tim says one of the most prominent trends of 2025 is Asian flavours, with Japan being a major driver of innovation. Reflecting this, CACAO has recently developed two new combinations: miso and banana, and mango and sticky rice.
“The sticky rice and mango pairing had been in my head for a while. It’s inspired by the popular Malaysian dish that I just can’t get enough of at the moment. The miso and banana delivers that crowd-pleasing salty-sweet combination, with a touch of earthiness,” he says.
For experienced chocolatier Laurent, pairing flavours is all about crafting novel experiences.
“It’s a bit like a fruit cocktail, you mix different elements to create something new. Customers are always looking for the next thing in food and drink, so we like to add twists to give our macarons the wow-factor,” he says.
The chefs admit there’s an element of trial and error to the creative process, and that while some flavours have been a hit with the NPD team, they haven’t always worked out in the wild.
“We introduced a panettone macaron, for which we baked panettone, smashed it up, and laced it into the cream. We thought it was amazing, but it just didn’t get off the ground in our wholesale partner venues,” says Tim.
“And then sometimes we create something amazing, but it’s hard to pull off at scale. For example, we created a great toasted marshmallow macaron, but the only way to get that authentic flavour was actually toasting marshmallows. It turned out to be a bit of a logistical nightmare when crafting thousands of macarons.”
This process of going above and beyond to create new flavours and ensure the quality of their products is consistently high is what Tim and Laurent believe makes CACAO stand out from the crowd.
When the brand was established by French master chocolatier Laurent in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 2003, he says no one else was crafting macarons or chocolate like him in Australia. Its success as a retail brand saw it quickly grow into a wholesale company, which today works with distributors to stock cafés, hotels, and other hospitality venues across the country.
“Few people knew what a macaron was when I started out 22 years ago. Yet, in 2010, MasterChef brought the macaron into the mainstream and from there it has become a staple,” says Laurent.
“People like them because they’re small, so you can enjoy just one on the side of a coffee or explore multiple flavours without over doing it.”
While CACAO now produces 30,000 macarons a day, supplies more than 500 cafés, and employs more than 50 members of staff, it has remained true to the traditional way of crafting the French treat – something Tim believes is a credit to its success.
“There’s a reason big manufacturers don’t attempt to make macarons and instead leave them to the artisans: you can’t mechanise the process,” he says.
“Although we have scaled up considerably in the past two decades, our process and techniques we use have remained largely unchanged. There is no way to automate this at the moment. We have always put quality first and that will never change.”
To ensure the macarons arrive at venues at peak freshness, they are frozen soon after completion. Café owners can then defrost the macarons as needed, with their petite size meaning they’ll be ready to eat in around 10 to 15 minutes.
“Customers buy with their eyes, so macarons are a fantastic choice for the café counter,” says Tim.
“What’s more, they’re not just a menu item but can be an upsell product. With various pack sizes, they are a great gift that will have a shelf life of around 10 days.”
Laurent recommends pairing a long black with CACAO’s passionfruit and macadamia macaron to bring out the beautiful acidity of the coffee, while Tim says you can’t go wrong with the classic flavours such as chocolate or pistachio alongside a silky flat white.
For more information, visit cacao.com.au
This article appears in the April/May 2025 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
