Bitter chocolate. Rotten.
Season 2. Netflix series. 2019.
Problems:
>Farmer poverty.
Belgium is the biggest chocolate maker in Europe. Chocolate engineering is only major can be found in Belgium. 270,000 tons of chocolate produced yearly and 2000 artisanal shops located nowadays in Belgium.
Barry Callebaut is the biggest factory of Belgium. Finest chocolate flavor is from less than 25 microns which melts on the tongue like butter.
From BEAN to BAR. FULL PROCESS.
1.Farmers(Pods + Beans) -> 2. Pisteur -> 3. Cooperatives for cleaning, milling and packing -> 4. Exporting -> 5. Cocoa trades -> 6. Chocolate makers -> 7. Retailers.
- Farmers. Pods and beans
Cocoa, main source of chocolate, is only grown near at Ecautor. 60% of global cocoa is from West Africa’s countries; Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), 25–30 million people are depending on cocoa considerably in those two countries.
For Cote d’Ivoire, cocoa industry has huge impact in economy by taking 15% of GDP and laboring 2/3(two of third) workers. Averagely 2 million tons of cocoa harvested in a year in Cote d’Ivoire.
Each tree of cocoa bears about 30 pods a year and using that pods makes 2 pounds of chocolate. 1 pod contains 40 cocoa beans.
Chocolate industry earns over 100 billion dollars a year but farmers earns less than 1 dollar per day. Farmer workers salary was 1.34$/kg in 2018. Average farmer of cocoa earns 200 dollar per year.
2. Pisteur.
Pisteur who are collector beans from farmers by buying it and transports to the cooperatives. Road situation is very hard. 6 hours on 60 km until main road.
3. Cooperatives.
Cooperatives mostly mill, clean and pack the beans. When 30–35 tons collected, transmit this to ports.
4. Exporters.
5. Cocoa traders.
They buy at the London price on future contracts. In this stage, some kind of processing made such as liquidefy beans to cocoa butter, or cocoa powder. Three big of most 10 players on that commodity market of cocoa is Barry Callebaut, Cargill and Olam. Cocoa traders are main subjects for defining price of cocoa. In 1970s, price of one ton of cocoa was 5700 USD, but nowadays it is lower than 1/3 (one third) of its.
Transmar was a family-business for trading cocoa and established a company named Euromar for reducing many stages of cocoa production. Transmar was main supplier to Hershey, Mars and Nestle. Initially, Euromar sales reached 80 million USD per month but because of instability of cocoa market, this company could not handle many contracts and also had in company has conflicts of inventory reporting .
Problems:
>Children slavery: In west Africa, 1.3 million people, mostly children are doing illegal light and heavy labor. Especially about 30,000 children is working in cocoa industry for feeding family or for slavery.
>Deforestation: 85% of forests are burned since 1990 in Cote d’Ivoire.