Guilang's Tableya

Guilang’s Tableya has run out of Canbanua, Argao, since 1948, when Miguela and Pedro Lanutan — known locally as Guilang and Ingko Pedong — started the business to pay for their children’s schooling. The cacao comes from Mt. Lantoy farmers rather than a wholesale supplier, and Ingko Pedong spent the shop’s early years adjusting the roast — speed, timing, flame intensity — until the tablets carried a taste distinct from the rest of Argao’s tableya makers, which is still the difference locals point to today.

Cacao arrived in the Philippines with the Spanish galleon trade in the seventeenth century, brought over from Mexico and taking root in the volcanic and limestone soils of the Visayas alongside coconut and abaca. By the time it reached everyday Cebuano households, cacao had settled into a specific, unglamorous role: tableya, ground and pressed into tablets, dissolved into sikwate for breakfast rather than treated as confectionery. That’s a different cultural path than cacao took almost everywhere else it was introduced, and it’s part of why sikwate reads as ordinary and daily in Cebu rather than as a specialty drink.

Guilang’s is, by design, a direct-trade operation rather than a commodity buyer: sourcing straight from Mt. Lantoy farmers means the growers get paid closer to what the finished product is worth, without a middleman processor taking a cut on both ends of the transaction. That arrangement has held for close to eight decades now, across at least two generations of the Lanutan family running the shop, which makes it one of the more durable small-agriculture relationships in the area — the kind of long-running buyer-grower link that a lot of smallholder cacao farming elsewhere in the country doesn’t get to rely on.

The roasting method Ingko Pedong worked out — adjusted by feel over years rather than measured to a written recipe — is also a reminder of how much of Philippine food heritage exists only as inherited technique rather than documentation. Nothing about the process is patented or published; it survives because someone in the family still does it the same way, batch after batch, and would be lost within a generation or two if that stopped. Buying tableya here isn’t just picking up a souvenir — it’s one of the more direct ways a visitor can put money behind a small food tradition staying in family hands rather than getting absorbed into a larger commercial cacao operation.

• Buy the stone-ground tablets for sikwate, Cebuano hot chocolate made thick with the cacao’s natural fat rather than stretched with milk powder.
• Ask to see the roasting and grinding process if a batch is running — the shop doesn’t hide production behind a retail counter.
• Tableya keeps for weeks unrefrigerated, which makes it one of the more practical Cebu souvenirs to carry home.
• The shop buys directly from Mt. Lantoy cacao growers rather than through a wholesale supplier, so a purchase here supports smallholder farmers as much as the Lanutan family itself.
• Nearly eight decades of continuous operation makes this one of Argao’s older still-running family businesses — worth knowing before you haggle over price.

Explore More in Argao

• St. Michael the Archangel Church (Argao Church)
• Hinablon sa Cebu Weaving Site (Cebu Technological University, Argao Campus)