There is truly nothing like chocolate, and there’s nothing like the shaggy dog story that transformed Mott Green from NYC squatter to premiere Grenadian chocolatier.

The tale began when he left New York to hitchhike his way around the Caribbean, eventually landing in Grenada. There, he took up residence in a bamboo house surrounded by cocoa trees and promptly fell in love with the land and with the chocolate. As he puts it, “My progression was: activist, love Grenada, love cocoa…”

It’s a love affair we can all enjoy, as that romance eventually bloomed into a chocolate factory with serious eco-integrity. Green claimed that he made the first “carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery” when he sailed chocolate from Grenada to New York City on his ship, which was outfitted with a wind-and-sun-powered cool room he built himself.

At the Belmont Estate, a member of a farmers’ co-op that supplies cocoa beans to Green’s factory, you can see the entire process that brings chocolate to life: tour guides walk through drying trays and dance in old copper pots to demonstrate the traditional methods of processing the beans.  Sadly, Green died an untimely death in 2013 at the age of 47, but his chocolate lives on.

You can learn his story in a documentary narrated by Susan Sarandon, but you have to go to Grenada to truly experience the tastes and smells and richness of the island and the estate that inspired Green to become a producer of some of the world’s finest chocolate.