Making the Right Choices Around Cocoa Sourcing

At Beau’s, we take our chocolate very seriously. Two of our five retail flavours – Mint Choc Chip and Chocolate Chip – are heavily reliant on cocoa as a core ingredient in the vegan chocolate chips that we make in-house while producing our gelato.

However, cocoa is a tricky product to get right when it comes to sourcing, as a significant proportion of the global cocoa market is exposed to practices that are exploitative to people and the planet. Avoiding these ethical and environmental pitfalls is of paramount concern for us when we look to source our raw ingredients, so finding a partner we can rely on is critical.

Labour issues with cocoa production

With 76.1% of all cocoa produced there, West Africa is the major global hub for cocoa growing – with Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire by far the largest suppliers. Côte d'Ivoire alone produces 2.12 million tons annually, making it responsible for just under half of the 4.8 million tons grown worldwide each year.

Even though we’ve known for decades that fairer working conditions are a must, pay for cocoa growers has remained appalling low across the sector – with the average farmer taking home less than $1 USD per day. On average, only 6% of the price a chocolate bar is sold for will go to the farmers themselves; whereas retailers and manufacturers will pocket 80% of the sale value.

A further concern is the lingering problem of child labour used in cocoa production. While several governments and companies involved in the cocoa trade had pledged to achieve a 70% reduction of child labour by 2020, these efforts were reported to have reached “less than 20 per cent of the over two million children impacted”, suggesting that there is a huge amount of work left to do in order to eradicate this practice among cocoa growers.

Environmental concerns around cocoa-growing

Cocoa production works best when part of a mixed crop plantation, with various rainforest crops such as bananas and maize growing alongside cocoa plants and larger, leafy trees offering shade that provides optimum conditions for growing cocoa.

While some predominant growing nations such as Ghana have established rules that ensure safe, sustainable growing (such as only allowing the crop to be produced in a specific agro-ecological area), mass deforestation has had a massive adverse environmental impact. This is particularly the case in Côte d'Ivoire, where 80% of the country’s forests have been lost in the past fifty years, largely as a result of land clearing for cocoa production

Even with regulations to enable more sustainable growing in Ghana, pesticide use in the country remains a major concern – notably the use of organochlorine pesticide, which is known to persist and contaminate its immediate environment after use and had been linked to a litany of health issues including birth defects, immune system dysfunction, neurological damage and breast cancer. Enforcement of restrictions and monitoring of pesticide use remains weak and often farmers remain uneducated as to the risks involved in their use.

Confusion around certification

Clearly, Fair Trade and Organic certifications have a significant role to play both in increasing awareness around sustainable practices and encouraging consumers to pay the premium that an ethically-sourced and fairly traded product inevitably carries. However, a common practice known as mass balance means that, even if an end product carries such a certification, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the cocoa used within the bar is certified.

In the same way that a green energy customer will buy clean energy from their supplier but the energy supplied to their property will be from various sources, a mass balance system sees certified and non-certified ingredients to become mixed during shipping and manufacturing. As the Rainforest Alliance notes, “mass balance is a great way to scale up sustainability, as it’s more affordable for companies than setting up a segregated supply chain.”

While it is a method that enables ethically-produced cocoa to enter the market in cases where segregated systems are not an option, this approach does mean that you cannot guarantee that you are consuming ethically sourced and organically certified ingredients simply by relying on certification labelling.

A different way forwards

At Beau’s, we’ve chosen to work with the brilliant Equal Exchange, which works with small-scale farmer co-ops across the Dominican Republic, Peru and Ecuador. All of the co-operatives they source from use organic and environmentally sustainable methods, which are shipped and produced in a segregated manner that ensures unethically-produced cocoa is not introduced to the end product.

Working exclusively with Equal Exchange means that we can guarantee that the chocolate that we use in Beau’s products are grown by farmers that are adequately compensated for their work, using planet-friendly practices that eschew harmful fertilisers and pesticides.

The cooperative model is crucial here, giving the farmers far more freedom and market clout than they would have as individuals and making organic practices more feasible, enabling more diverse farms with a combination of fruit plants, shade trees and cacao trees. This not only has a positive influence on wildlife diversity but also means growers are better protected against the effects of extreme weather. 

As opposed to buying blind through importers and brokers, purchasing in this way with a partner like Equal Exchange means we get complete transparency across the board, and means we can supply our chocolate-based gelato knowing full well that all of the cocoa that is both socially and environmentally responsible – just like the rest of our ingredients.

You can find out more about Equal Exchange and its practices here.