Opinion
The harsh reality of cocoa production
I’m currently in the Ivory Coast, visiting the PACTS cocoa bean sustainability project I’m involved with. After one year, we now have 12 fermentation centres, with 18 more to come.
As I pass through the plantations, the harsh reality of cocoa growing came back to me
Now that the civil crisis is over and the shooting has stopped, allowing some form of normality to return, it was possible to travel in the bush and support as many of our people as possible.
It appears that there are still 400,000 souls who are still to return to the Ivory Coast having fled the country when the violence started, and this is very apparent in the capital city of Abidjan, where it’s deserted at night.
As I pass through the plantations, the harsh reality of cocoa growing came back to me, and I thought it would be a good notion to highlight the numbers involved.
- Each cocoa pod produces only 40g of beans.
- Each cocoa tree only produces 45–50 pods = < 2.0kg of beans.
- It takes 25,000 pods to produce a tonne of cocoa beans.
- Based on the current world production, this equates to 92,500,000,000 pods, all opened by hand.
- Average yields in the world’s largest cocoa producer, Ivory Coast, are only 400kg per hectare.
- There are 900,000 farmers in Ivory Coast, producing a main crop of 1.1m tonnes = 1.2t per farmer.
Cocoa faces a significant sustainably challenge in the future if we cannot make a quantum leap with the above results in the next 5–10 years.
This is something to think about when you next buy your favourite chocolate bar.
Marc Donaldson is a partner at On The Ball Consulting. He’s the former president of Delfi Cocoa and the former CEO of Heritage Fine Chocolates. He was also managing director Asia Pacific for Barry Callebaut.
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Marc Donaldson is a partner at On The Ball Consulting
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