José Ramón López Beltrán will open a new branch of his chocolate factory in Tabasco

The chocolate shop owned by José Ramón López Beltrán and his brothers will grow with the opening of a branch in Tabasco territory. Chocolates Rocío, named after the late first wife of the current president of Mexico, made the announcement on Instagram with the short message: “We are almost ready to receive you in our new store in Villahermosa, Tabasco!” , this after in previous days they revealed that the business would expand and invited their followers to guess where it would be located.

The chocolate company began operations in 2019, a year after Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to power and his son José Ramón announced that he would not hold any public office during his father's term. It is worth mentioning that Lopez Beltran has been questioned on social media about the source of monetary income that allows him to maintain a luxurious lifestyle, with an apartment in Houston, Texas and family vacations in places like Aspen, Colorado.

The business, as detailed on its website, creates “high quality chocolate, capable of conquering the most demanding palates and competing with the finest chocolates in the world”. Production takes place on a small scale in a workshop in Mexico City, where cocoa beans are manually selected and then transformed into low-production machines. The raw material comes from a family farm where it is sown, harvested, fermented and dried before being sent to the metropolitan area.

At the end of 2021, the business of the children of López Obrador was marked by the origin of cocoa, since according to a journalistic investigation by Aristegui Noticias, the farm where it is grown benefited from the government program Sembrando Vida, which aims to reduce rural poverty and environmental degradation. AMLO denied the allegations during one of his morning press conferences, in which he assured that the property is family inheritance and that the arguments against his children were false.

Despite criticism, the entrepreneurship of the López Beltrán family has been growing. It currently offers bars of different types of chocolate, as well as intoxicating and carbonated drinks that were added to the menu months after the opening of the first store, at the end of 2019. In general, the opinions of those who have tried the products are good, regarding quality and taste, but they are disparate in terms of the service offered by the staff who work for the chocolate factory, located on República de Guatemala Street in the Historic Center of the CDMX.

Google reviews highlight the national origin of cocoa, recommend some specific products, such as cacao frappé and emphasize that it is a small but cozy place where employees give friendly treatment to consumers and explain in detail the production process of each chocolate and drink they order. However, there are also some negative comments from customers who claim to have waited more than two hours to be attended to and from some others who believe that there are gourmet chocolate shops with a higher quality offer, presentation and better price.

While on Twitter it has received criticism related to the origin of the funds with which it has been financed. Among the most recent comments, some stand out such as: “Chocolates Rocío will go down in history, LitiomeX already has partners”, referring to the Mining Law with which López Obrador seeks to nationalize lithium, after the Electricity Reform was rejected by Congress on Sunday.

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