Celebrating 20 Years of Small Farmer Grown Chocolate
Left, early Equal Exchange Hot Cocoa held by a member of CONACADO co-op in the Dominican Republic in 2003; right, Dary Goodrich of Equal Exchange holding a Caramel Crunch chocolate bar from 2013; background, newly redesigned chocolate bars from 2022.
A look back at Equal Exchange Chocolate through the years
Equal Exchange is celebrating 36 years since its founding on May Day, 1986. It brings us great pleasure to also share the fact that in 2022, Equal Exchange is celebrating 20 years of our chocolate program! In honor of this chocolate anniversary (dare we say chocoversary?), Dary Goodrich, our Chocolate Products Manager, is sharing some highlights, and a few lowlights, from Equal Exchange’s chocolate program as well as the chocolate industry over the past 20 years.
-
After a survey of our Interfaith customers asking which products they would like to see beyond coffee, we decided to launch hot cocoa! Kind of a no brainer, given it’s another hot beverage made with products from small-scale farmers that face similar challenges to coffee farmers. Equal Exchange launched the first instant organic and fair trade hot cocoa mix in the US, through an innovative collaboration with our longstanding partner, La Siembra in Canada, as well as 4 farmer cooperatives in the Dominican Republic, Paraguay and the US.
-
One of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded, Hurricane Jeanne struck the Dominican Republic causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in the country, including devastating impact to cocoa farms and farmer livelihoods. In conjunction with our partner, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, Equal Exchange was able to send $58,000 in relief funds to our Dominican partner, the CONACADO cooperative, to support farmers with immediate needs in the aftermath of the hurricane.
-
Our continued collaboration with La Siembra led Equal Exchange to pioneering organic and fair trade companies in Switzerland that were the first companies sourcing organic and fair trade cocoa and sugar and manufacturing it into chocolate bars. With their help, during Equal Exchange’s 20th year, we launched our Organic Very Dark Chocolate, Organic Almond Dark Chocolate and Organic Milk Chocolate. The addition of these products allowed us to begin sourcing cacao beans from Peruvian cooperatives. With the launch of these bars, we were one of the only nationally distributed companies selling a full line of organic and fair trade chocolate bars at a time when “sustainability” in the chocolate industry was almost unheard of.
-
10 Equal Exchange staff spent a week visiting the CONACADO cooperative in Dominican Republic. Staff visited CONACADO’s office and collection centers, where they ferment and dry cacao beans, as well as participated in homestays with members of CONACADO where we learned how to harvest cacao and shared meals and stories together. It was a transformative experience and one we continued to repeat with CONACADO and other cacao cooperatives, pre-Covid, for our staff who have been at Equal Exchange for more than 2 years.
-
Using cacao from the COCABO cooperative in Panama, we began selling our first single origin chocolate bar, which is our Organic Panama Extra Dark Chocolate (80% Cacao) bar. By 2013, this bar had become our best selling chocolate bar!
-
A group of international NGOs published the Sweetness Follows report as a comprehensive review of the major challenges - child labor, environmental degradation and imbalance in power - entrenched in the conventional chocolate system. The organization transformed into the VOICE Network, which has published a Cocoa Barometer about every 2 years to share updates on the “State of Sustainability” in cocoa.
For latest report, scroll down to 2020: Latest edition of the 'Cocoa Barometer'
-
Equal Exchange took a big leap and was awarded a 5 year grant from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Cooperative Development Program (CDP). This award, later extended to 8 years in total, allowed us to work in new ways with our coffee and cacao farmer partners by directly supporting the needs of 8 farmer cooperatives in 3 countries in the areas of productivity, quality and member equity.
-
Basilio Almonte de los Santos, an agronomist at the CONACADO cooperative, and Ramon Matias Frias Gonzalez, a cacao farmer and member of CONACADO visited the US to learn about Equal Exchange and the US chocolate market as well as share about their work, the realities and challenges that face cacao farmers and the impact of fair trade and cooperatives. They met with Equal Exchange staff and presented at Equal Exchange accounts and community events in Massachusetts, Vermont and New York. Along the way, Basilio and Ramon also got to visit Fenway Park, an Organic Valley dairy farm and a sugar shack to enjoy some delicious Vermont maple syrup!
-
Armajaro, a European hedge fund, buys almost a billion dollars worth of cocoa beans. This was about 7 Titanics worth of cocoa beans, most of the cocoa beans in Europe at the time, which could make about 5 billion chocolate bars. Armajaro was betting on an increase in the market price to later sell the beans for millions of dollars in profit. The trade showcased who has access to money, power and control in the chocolate industry and the ways outside factors can impact farmer livelihoods.
-
In an industry where the manufacturing stages are dominated by giant multi-nationals, it is rare for any manufacturing, let alone farmer-owned manufacturing, to be done in countries of origin where cacao is grown. In the Dominican Republic, the farmers of CONACADO moved up the value chain and challenged the conventional system by purchasing a manufacturing plant in 2008 to produce “semi-finished” cocoa products (chocolate liquor, cocoa butter and cocoa powder). Equal Exchange was excited to directly purchase and import our first container of cocoa powder from CONACADO, which was used in our hot cocoa and baking cocoa products.
-
With the help of a Peruvian manufacturing partner, we began selling 3 candy bars; Dark Chocolate Fruit and Nut bar, Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter bar and Milk Chocolate Crisp bar. Sadly, these didn’t get much traction and in less than 3 years, they were discontinued. But these products allowed us to begin a relationship with our Peru manufacturing partner, which led to…
-
We began selling Peruvian made Semi-Sweet and Bittersweet chocolate chips, which expanded Equal Exchange’s baking offering and continued to build this part of the market for small-scale farmers while supporting more value added activity in a different origin country.
-
Enough said!
-
Similar to cocoa, the sugar industry is characterized by a massive imbalance of power dominated by large mills often owned by wealthy and powerful families. In Paraguay, the Manduvira cooperative flipped the system upside down when it inaugurated the first and only farmer-owned organic sugar mill in the world. In 2014, Equal Exchange imported 4 containers of sugar from Manduvira’s new sugar mill.
-
A better than normal cocoa harvest in West Africa leads to an international cocoa market price drop from around a high of $3,000/Metric Ton (MT) in 2016 to $1,900/MT by June 20, 2017. Farmers lost about a third of the value of their product. These low commodity prices were devastating for the millions of cocoa farmers worldwide putting further pressure on already strained communities, where cocoa farmers could barely put food on the table and further driving farmers into debt.
-
Twelve Equal Exchange staff and Sales customers journey to Lamas, Peru to learn from the Oro Verde cooperative. During the delegation they learn about the history and production of cacao in Peru and the San Martin region, see the impact of our Cooperative Development Program, participate in homestays with cacao farmers in the community of Sisa, learn some Spanish and Quecha, taste a variety of Peruvian chocolates and more.
-
In 2017, Equal Exchange was approached by Gebana, a Swiss fair trade organization, about work with organic and fair trade farmer cooperatives in Togo. After learning more about this groundbreaking work to build an alternative organic and traceable supply chain in the West African context, Equal Exchange began working with Gebana Togo and two different farmer cooperatives, SCOOPS PROCAB and SCOOPS IKPA. In 2019, we launched our Total Eclipse 92%, which is our first chocolate bar using cocoa beans from West Africa! You can now also enjoy cocoa from Togo in our Classic Milk, Milk Caramel Crunch with Sea Salt and Dark Caramel Crunch with Sea Salt bars.
-
We closed out our first USAID Cooperative Development program that began in 2010. Over the life of the program, we accessed over $4 million in funding to reach over 19,000 cacao and coffee farmers in 4 countries. According to our final evaluation, Equal Exchange and our farmer partners considered the program a huge success and a unique way to support the critical needs of cooperatives and small-scale farmers in Dominican Republic, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. In our key program areas, our cooperative partners built $4.8 million in member equity from their members, garnered over $5 million in quality premiums and increased farm yields by 85% on average across the participating cooperatives.
-
The two largest cocoa producers, Côte D'Ivoire and Ghana, who supply over 60% of the world’s cocoa, announce an agreement to implement a Living Income Differential (LID). The goal is to help alleviate continued widespread poverty in the cocoa industry by making buyers pay a $400 differential on top of the market price. While the initial reception and implementation seemed to work for the governments and largest cocoa and chocolate companies, the reality is that multinationals have tried to circumvent the system and farmers are not reaping many benefits.
-
In October 2019, the effective minimum Fairtrade and organic price for cocoa beans changed from $2,500/MT to $2,940/MT. Equal Exchange’s average bean price in 2019 was $3,066/MT, about 31% over the average New York market price of $2,341/MT. Despite this increase in the fair trade minimum price, Fairtrade International also shared Living Income Reference Price information, showing that even these higher prices are not enough for small-scale farmers and living income for cocoa farmers begins to be a more wide-spread conversation throughout the entire industry.
-
COVID-19 changed lives the world over. When it first appeared, we were concerned not only about what it would mean for Equal Exchange and our staff but also our farmer partners. We communicated with our partners more frequently and in new ways to understand the impact of the virus in the rural communities where farmers grow cacao and sugar. Like many around the world, farmers were impacted by strained logistics, loss of income and increased food insecurity. In response, we opened up funding, both directly and through our partners at the Rudolf Steiner Foundation and the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Fair Trade Small Producers and Workers to support cooperatives in ways that would best meet the immediate needs of their members. Four cacao cooperatives took advantage of this opportunity and money was disbursed in both 2020 and 2021 for projects such as supplying basic PPE and food needs, building family and community gardens and raising chickens.
-
Despite an unpredictable year and a lot of unknowns, with the support of many of our customers who were baking delicious goodies and drinking hot cocoa at home, we ended a strong sales year for our chocolate and cocoa products.
-
The VOICE Network publishes the latest Cocoa Barometer. The introductory paragraph reads “After two decades of failed interventions across the cocoa sector, cocoa farming communities are still battling the effects of poverty, child labour and deforestation. The 2020 Cocoa Barometer report is a rallying call to action for all stakeholders to push forward and deliver on their promises to end deforestation and human rights abuses in cocoa supply chains. Twenty years into rhetoric, the challenges on the ground remain as large as ever. Poverty is still the daily reality for virtually all West African cocoa farmer families, child labour remains rife, and old growth forests continue to be cleared to make way for cocoa production.” Another report was released in 2020 by the nonpartisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago on child labor in the cocoa and chocolate industry. The report looked at trends over time and found that while some bright spots, like an increase in the percentage of children attending school, due to the overall significant increase of cocoa production in these 2 countries, the percentage of child labor and hazardous forms of child labor increased between the 2008/2009 harvest and the 2018/2019 harvest and that in 2019 there were still over 1.5 million cases of child labor in Côte D’Ivoire and Ghana.
As we write this in 2022, it’s amazing to look back and reflect on our work in chocolate, which is about sourcing cacao, sugar, and vanilla from farmer cooperatives that are working to change trade and bring more benefits to small-scale farmers who so often lack power and a voice on the conventional system. During this time our customers have enjoyed over 43 million Equal Exchange chocolate bars, 6.5 million Equal Exchange cans of cocoa, and 3.5 million bags of chocolate chips. This has meant Equal Exchange purchases of around 15,000 Metric Tons of organic and fairly traded cocoa and sugar from our farmer partners! In spite of this success and our strongest year yet in 2020, our chocolate and cocoa sales declined in 2021, and we face ever more challenging headwinds with continued market consolidation and increased competition, often by companies where “sustainability” is driven by the bottom line, not an authentic desire to build a better world. We remain committed to building this alternative for our farmer partners and customers and hope you will play a role in helping keep our chocolate program a success for the next 20 years to come!
