THE GRENADA Chocolate Company looks like a kid's playhouse—a pastel two-story home high in the island's rainforest interior, surrounded by banana leaves swaying in the trade winds. When we arrive at three o'clock in the afternoon, Mott, bedheaded and unfresh from a nap but impressed we've persevered, shows us around in his boxers.

His factory is one of the few in the world that grows its own cocoa. While roughly 70 percent of the chocolate sold in the U.S. is made by just five companies, which buy beans already roasted by other companies, a small number of artisanal makers roast their own beans ("bean-to-bar"). At GCC, the beans are freshly harvested and roasted on the island. Mott calls this "tree-to-bar" and believes the thundering brownie flavor is the direct expression of the island's mulchy soil—the terroir, in winespeak. The snobs agree. At London's Academy of Chocolate's 2008 awards, the co-op tied French powerhouse Valrhona for best organic dark-chocolate bar.

Mott, it turns out, is a great guy, if a little Motty—passionately scattered. A Staten Island native, he dropped out of college, and then American society, ending up a few years later living in a bamboo hut on a nutmeg farm in the Grenadian bush. When prices for Grenada's amazing cocoa began declining, in the mid-nineties, he decided to start the co-op.

Together with his partners, Oregonian Doug Browne and local Edmond Brown, he spent three years learning the finicky process of chocolate making—the roasting, shelling, crushing, refining, mixing, and tempering that transforms pulpy fruit into hot liquor and, finally, creamy bars. A lifelong tinkerer, he built whatever small-batch machinery they couldn't rustle up from European auctions or dusty Jamaican basements. It's a tidy operation, partly solar-powered and employing just 14 Grenadians and Mott. But it's profitable, selling about 2,000 organic bars a week.

At the end of the informational tour, it's business time. Mott's eyes widen when I place our $1,000 order. But I've done the math, and I figure if we buy a grand's worth for the standard wholesale price of eight Eastern Caribbean dollars (US$3) per bar and sell them to shops for EC$12 (US$4.50) and to individuals for EC$16 (US$6), then we can earn at least 650 greenbacks, enough to cover our on-water costs for the week.

"How are you going to keep it from melting?" Mott asks.

Our two ideas now sound a little impractical: (1) Find a 50-gallon drum, fill it with dirt, and then bury the bars inside—a sort of portable root cellar. (2) Eat them. I mumble something incoherent about coolers, and then gaze toward the sky, where ashen rain clouds have dropped the temp to around 70 degrees, the threshold of solid chocolate. Ten minutes later, 348 bars are snugly loaded into a large TV box, and Mott is waving goodbye, yelling his only instructions: "Sell 'em for as much as you want. Tell me how it goes!"