Here's what a $260 bar of chocolate looks like

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Jerry Toth hopes so. Mr. Toth, 36, a former Wall Street analyst who was born in Winnetka, moved to Ecuador in 2002, following a girlfriend. There, the two helped develop a 1,000-acre forest preserve in coastal Ecuador and worked with nearby farmers to reforest cattle pastures with

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A mere 574 bars, each about 1.5 ounces, have been produced. Each comes in a hand-made box of Spanish elm that also contains a special tweezers-like device that enables you to taste the chocolate without touching it with fingers and contaminating its pure flavor with oils and other off-notes.

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Why the high price? Some 95 percent of all chocolate is made from mass-produced cacao beans. The remaining 5 percent is produced from rare fino y de aroma cacao, most of which grows only in Ecuador. In 1916, a fungus destroyed much Ecuadorian cacao, but it spared trees that are now the source for To'ak chocolate.

The rarity of the trees and their beans, plus the meticulous, labor-intensive process of sorting the beans in a six-step process, justifies the price, Mr. Toth says.

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