Co-founder Claire is quoted in an article about rising cocoa prices in the Sunday Times

By co-founder Claire:
I was interviewed by Louise Eccles, the Consumer Affairs Editor for the Sunday Times recently about why cocoa prices are rising so much and the impact on the price and availability of chocolates for you to all enjoy.  We spent a long time discussing the main issues driving the decreasing supply of cocoa from the main cocoa producing countries of Ivory Coast & Ghana, which alone account for 60% of global cocoa production, which is driving up global cocoa prices.

I wrote a long piece about this in my Why cocoa prizes are rising crazily fast' blog back in the Spring and have just updated it, so for the full story, please have a read of that.

Overall, Louise picked up on my plea which is that we all have to start thinking about chocolate in a different way - it is only going to get increasingly precious as climate change has an increasing impact on harvests, the likelihood of poor harvests due to either too much rain (the problem last year) or not enough (the problem this year) yields and we all need to stop thinking of it as a cheap sweet food. We need to start appreciating it in the way that we do other food & drink products like wine or olive oil (which has also seen a stratospheric rise in prices recently thanks to recent poor harvests).

The piece in the Sunday Times also quotes Mondelez (which owns Cadbury) & Nestle who are part of 'Big Chocolate' which is part of the problem, dare I say it - they need to start putting up prices to start to educate consumers that chocolate should not be seen as a cheap food & they need to put pressure on the government-run cocoa boards in Ivory Coast & Ghana to put their 'farmgate' prices up. These are the prices set by the cocoa boards that the farmers are paid for their cocoa beans and both historically (and now) these prices are way lower than the market rate and do not equate to a living wage for these farmers - until they get paid a fair price for their beans, we will never be able to break the cycle in West Africa of low incomes, enforced labour, lack of investment in planting new trees, working in illegal gold mining instead, smuggling beans across borders to countries where they can get a higher price...the list of issues is long (and quite depressing) and these massive multi-nationals need to do more to change the paradigm in the way the industry is structured in West Africa.

We don't work with chocolate made from West African beans, we work with our chocolate partners in Ecuador, Colombia & Madagascar who make chocolate for us (to our own exclusive recipes for our signature milk & dark) and who pay their local cocoa farmers the MARKET rate for their cocoa - so the farmers are being paid a very fair price. By working directly with the farmers, everyone benefits, more of the value chain is kept in the countries of origin as they are producing a value added finished product to export direct to us & we have 100% traceability of where our cocoa comes from & the chocolate that we work with here at Chococo.
Our dark chocolate is made with beans that come from a single estate too - hows that for traceability from farm to Chococo!