alyssa jade mcdonald

The legacy I will leave

To have been the Trojan horse which:
- snuck into the Michelin star restaurants and showed from the gastronomy side that healthy growing and processing (nutrition) and taste can go together

- snuck into regulation papers and left and imprint that demanded that food manufacturers deliver nutrition which contributes to a person’s health WHILE contributing to the earth at the same time.

It’s very simple really.

My goals for my social enterprise BLYSS

To help our kitchen chefs win more awards and stars for their menus, to delight the guests of our hotel customers who receive surprises on their most memorable days in the spa or the bar.

To influence a reduction of diabetes in the Arabic peninsula through a change in food standards , to keep teaching gastronomy in evolving communities (South America-North Africa) so they don’t go down the path of ‘western food’ and maintain traditional whole food treasures

What BLYSS "does"

We created single bean virgin chocolate, which as we’ve been told by kitchen chefs and sommeliers from Europe to the Gulf is “the most pure chocolate in the world”.

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Experts recommend our chocolate because of two key reasons: we work with about 450 families on 2 sustainable plantations in Ecuador to grow and love authentic genetic Arriba Nacionale cacao trees (very rare trees!) and then carefully pluck them to be sun-dried and cold-ground for molecular integrity.

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This means, that with very low heat and a pure organic species, the aroma and taste of the cacao is maintained by a very long and loved handwork. This chocolate which we offer exclusively to star chefs and sommeliers is our proof-point for better standards of manufacturing in nutrition where we actively lobby and influence diplomatics and ‘Quality of Life’ measures from the Arabic peninsula to South America. We proudly offer vintage and terroir based chocolate for cooking, gifting, and body care.

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Our BLYSS is the result of almost 100 years of plantation and pattissier expertise from Papua New Guinea, Australia, to Germany and Ecuador in it’s modern inversion by grand-daughter of the Ilolo Estate, Alyssa Jade McDonald, who named the present company after her nickname, ‘lyss’ and the meaning of spiritual ‘bliss’, as her personal commitment to a better world for the next generation to follow in the family footsteps.

Where BLYSS came from

The basis of BLYSS is Ilolo Estate which started in the un-carved jungles of Papua New Guinea in the 1920s by social entrepreneurs Percy and Gertrude McDonald, it passed through to son Robert and his Australian bride, Patricia who developed the multi-diverse plantations further. Meanwhile, Patricia’s father, a renowned patissier in Sydney was crafting elegant tiered desserts and gateaux’s with his wife Beatrice in their Randwick atelier for decades.

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Together the influence of 3 sets of SocEnts encouraged granddaughter to contribute to the family vision and pick up old note books from Ilolo Estate, recipes secrets from Sydney and get the detailed infos of plantations, villages and diplomatics to found the modern inversion of 100 years of experience into ​BLYSS gmbH in Germany and Ecuador.



Discussions with the family to found the modern inversion: 2007
Search for the right plantations and partners: 2008-9
Launching of “BLYSS” as a GmbH in Germany: 2010-1

How I came to this point

My parents and grand parents were social entrepreneurs, who cared for rubber forests and raised cattle in the wild hills of Papua New Guinea and Australia – naturally I had to ‘escape this crazy life’ and worked for a decade in large corporations pursuing a ‘corporate’ life. Poetically, my toxic lifestyle in beurocratric profit driven companies made my body sick and I looked with wet eyes back at my family asking for ‘the meaning of life’. They shrugged and just continued to tell stories of the great life on plantation, running their own social enterprises and how they couldn’t relate to me – because they always lived their dream.



Finally all the years of dinners around the family table thwacked me between the eyes and I started to look at old notebooks, and photos, business ledgers written in brown pencil on kraft paper and recipe books that had been covered with dust since they retired. I decided to un-retire the family tradition and take control of my health at the same time. With almost 100 years of social enterprise expertise within my genes, I put on my jeans and went to ‘real work’ and took the best of what we had done in PNG and Australia to Ecuador and Germany. I asked my father to go to Ecuador in search of a rare and special species of cacao I had read about called the Arriba Nacionale, and lived for two years sending me packages of infos, goodies, pictures and cacao for my idea to create a chocolate that could truly be good for the body and the world.

It took 3 years of trial and error in the kitchen to come up with my BLYSS. On weekends I studied food hazards and health science, then ground up cacao beans in my altbau in Germany and delivered little white paper packages of ‘test chocolate’ to my friends on a Sunday night with a feedback form to improve recipes. This was my safe way of starting a new idea, keeping the corporate job and working on my passion over weekends.

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The turning point came when I received a phone call from doctors in Ecuador who said my father was gravely ill in hospital. I hardly believed it because he had just hiked up machu picchu the month before. I packed my bags within an hour and spent a tear-filled day in the office with my very kind bosses who gave the grace of leave to go immediately to see him in South America. Although I believe corporations are investor-driven toxic organisations in the business world, in the private world they are run by dear-hearted people . A paradox I have been struggling with ever since. Within 14 hours I was at my father’s side and over the next weeks his condition deteriorated. I would arrive at the hospital with wall charts and markers, dancing around writing up more plans for the work I needed him to ‘get well’ for and go out to more plantations for the authentic genetic species we were looking for. Together we sang The Way You Look Tonight and one day, he looked at me and said ‘Flossie, it’s your turn. Take it up, learn from everything I have told you from our plantations in PNG, my notes from Ecuador, talk with your mother and get the final hints from her. I want you to LIVE, because you are dying in your current world. Finish off what we started’. He passed soon after and in the same week, his doctors told me I would have the same fate if I didn’t fix my health and lifestyle. It was an easy decision. I called my corporate boss, quit my job and committed to building BLYSS in the modern format of my grandparent’s Ilolo Estate.

My health returned the moment I started living my truth.

My life returned the moment I had the courage to create my own standards.

I lost everything with this decision.

And then I gained more than I ever imagined back again.