Despite the UK cocoa trade bringing in £4 billion/ year, the average cocoa grower in the Cote D’Ivoire lives on just 75p/day – less than half the local living costs for just one person, let alone a family. Lil’s Lou chats with our pals the Chocolate Tree about how the food of the gods is anything but for some growers.

I have to confess, I thought chocolate was the darling of the fairtrade movement and we’d kind of “fixed” it. Not so.

Scarily, in the UK we spend £4bn a year – three chocolate bars a week for every single person – on choccie. But a lot of the growers can barely afford to keep farming. In fact, one grower that spoke to Fairtrade was talking about ripping up his cocoa plants in favour of palm oil. Prices are decreasing for growers while they face increasing climate uncertainty and associated crop diseases, and yet all the mass-produced Easter eggs are out for half price. Beware the bargain – someone is always paying.

The Chocolate Tree’s Ali answers our questions to help explain why:

Ali Freddy- photo credit Emma Martin Photography[46397].jpg — *What 3 things do you most want to tell someone when you see them eating mass produced choc bars?*
Stop, stop and stop. For several reasons: firstly there’s supporting companies that have failed consistently to improve the conditions for people working at the start of the supply chain.
I can’t believe anyone would knowingly support the cheap confectionary industry if they really knew the exploitation that is happening at the origin of crops like cocoa and sugar.
Secondly, even if it’s Fairtrade (FT) certified the chances that the actual chocolate you are eating comes from a Fairtrade certified farm are disputable. That may seem odd, but check out ‘Mass Balance’. This system means that companies who produce some FT and some non-FT chocolate can mix all their cacao together and put it into all their products.

You’d expect the Fairtrade chocolate bar you eat to be made from 100% fair trade cacao right? Wrong.

Thirdly, and most importantly to the consumers’ health, these products are often made with excessive sugar and alternative fats to replace the expensive cocoa butter that should be used. This kind of product will lead to obesity and other real health problems, it makes me really sad to see so many ordinary families being sucked in to the marketing campaigns of unhealthy food products. Real chocolate is so much better for you, the environment and the people at cocoa origin. To use it for these kinds of cheap mass-produced products is in my opinion kind of insulting given its historical significance as a sacred food.

Tell me again why you guys aren’t Fairtrade?

We decided early on that organic certification suited our ethos well, and although the chocolate couverture we were buying was actually Fairtrade certified that organic was enough for us. Our main focus as a company is to protect biodiversity through agroforestry techniques on farms, so organic certification is very suitable for us.

Over time, around 2010 I think, Fairtrade organisations started to be exposed for failing to deliver on their ambition to actually raise the farm gate price for farmers, with much of the money being lost due to corruption or spent on administration. We had been considering taking the certification after all the bad press we decided it wasn’t dependable enough. Around the same time, in 2011, we started buying cacao directly from South America. At this point we began to make our chocolate from cacao beans, instead of buying in a pre-made couverture. This meant we could get better access to the farms and more transparency about the pricing.

The speciality cacao we were purchasing was ensuring farmers received around $3.50 per kg for the cacao, much more than the Fairtrade price. And the organisations and cooperatives purchasing from the farmers were also working to improve many other aspects for the communities. By the time we received the cacao we were paying close to $10 for it. This high price doesn’t only ensure the farmers gets a good price (much better than Fairtrade) but also that the post harvest process is done really well. This process involved fermentation and drying the cacao, it has to be done right or we can’t achieve the kind of extraordinary flavours you will find in our chocolate.

What would your Easter wish be?

I am hoping to visit our partners in the south of Mexico this Easter! It will be my second visit to Tabasco & Chiapas, this is a rich jungle area with lots of wildlife and fascinating culture and history. Our partner there has been working in Mexican politics and I look forward to sharing a dram or 2 with him! I think the best thing to do instead of buying Easter eggs for kids would be to find a workshop where you can make one. Otherwise, please buy from an artisanal maker.

Quality will always beat quantity when it comes to Easter Eggs!

We followed up on Ali’s comment about a workshop, and the Chocolate Tree is offering workshops on Saturday 4 April, £35 to create your own egg with organic ingredients and professional tools under the wing of Friederike, Chocolate Tree’s master chocolatier. Includes a tour of the factory, tasting and an egg and spoon race, weather permitting. Email hello@dolilthings.org for further details.

What first prompted you to look into chocolate production?

It started when we built a large geodesic dome tent to take to festivals: it began by us being interested in the maths behind the tent’s construction, but we also wanted to make it into a travelling chocolaterie. Friederike is a mathematician, but she has always been exceptional at making cakes and has amazing attention to detail. It was part of her upbringing in Lubeck, Germany, that she would always bring cakes to parties in our university days. This caught my attention, I asked her if she wanted to make a summer business with it at the festivals and the rest is history. Chocolate attracted her because it is a very technical and creative medium to work with, for me it was about working with a food where we could make a real difference to people and the environment. Initially this was just by purchasing organic and Fairtrade certified chocolate to work with, but we have since become much more involved.

What do you love about it?

I love chocolate. It’s a mysterious and magical food, I call it ‘food for the heart’. It’s part sweet, part sustenance, part aphrodisiac and has many beneficial health properties, if there is enough cacao and not too much sugar. I love working with it, all the smells and textures in the factory are a delight to me every time I work there. It’s really a wonderful food, I eat about 50g of dark chocolate every day.

Lil sources our Chocolate buttons and Hot Chocolate from Chocolate Tree.

Additional info from http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/Farmers-and-Workers/Cocoa