Diego de Landa's sixteenth century account of Yucatec Maya customs describes a specific annual festival held by cacao growers in honor of Ek Chuaj, along with the rain god Chaac and another deity, timed to a particular month of the Maya calendar and involving the burning of incense and the ritual sacrifice of an animal, in Landa's description a dog marked with spots resembling the color of cacao, offered in the hope of a successful harvest from the cacao groves that were, for growers, both a livelihood and a source of the currency that ran through much of Mesoamerican trade.
Landa's account, like his writing on Ix Chel and Cozumel, needs to be read with appropriate caution, since it comes from a churchman writing decades after the conquest with his own religious agenda and imperfect access to the beliefs he described, but the basic association it records, between Ek Chuaj, cacao cultivation, and a dedicated agricultural festival, fits consistently with the god's broader documented profile as patron of the cacao trade in both the codices and other colonial sources.
Cacao's importance as currency in Mesoamerica is independently well attested from Spanish colonial administrative records, which describe cacao beans used to pay for goods and even document counterfeiting schemes in which beans were hollowed out and refilled with sand or dirt to pass at face value, underscoring just how thoroughly the crop functioned as real money rather than merely a prized commodity, and giving concrete economic weight to Ek Chuaj's patronage of both the beans themselves and the merchants who carried them across the trade routes of the Maya world.