Our Action Plan
The Cocoa Journey
The journey from the cocoa bean to the chocolate you enjoy today is typically long and complex. In Côte d’Ivoire for example, it starts with the farmer, who sells his crop either to a cooperative or a pisteur. There are about 700 cooperatives in the country and around 5,000 independent pisteurs. These are roving buyers/salesmen who call on farmers to buy as much cocoa as they can. They’re called pisteurs because they go up and down the pistes or rough tracks which lead to the cocoa villages.
The cooperatives and pisteurs sell to larger middlemen called traitants, who in turn sell to exporters, who sell to traders who sell to processors. Quite a journey, as you can see! Yet, each role plays its part in moving, conditioning, grouping or bagging cocoa. However, too many links in the chain can mean that the farmer isn’t paid sufficiently. It can also make it difficult to know exactly where the cocoa is coming from, which in turn makes it difficult to track back to the farmers so that they can be appropriately trained and encouraged to improve their farming practices and the quality of the beans.
In effect, the beans from many different trees and farms are combined, and increasingly larger quantities are sold from one buyer to the next, until the beans reach the shipping port. Here, beans from literally thousands of villages are combined into large shipments to countries across the world.
We are partnering with some cooperatives directly in Côte d’Ivoire and Ecuador and others, through Cargill, one of the world’s largest companies in sourcing and processing cocoa beans and Olam, a global cocoa trader.
Helping Cooperatives Become Competitive
Cooperatives discussing cocoa bean supply with an Ivorian farmer
In Côte d’Ivoire, in particular, Nestlé and others are helping the cooperatives to become competitive and operate in the interests of farmers, the local community and the industry as a whole. One example is to make the cocoa beans “export-ready” at the local cooperative, thereby shortening the chain by cutting out further middlemen.
These mutually beneficial partnerships have fulfilled two important goals:
- Encouraging efficiencies in the supply chain, and
- Promoting our responsibility towards communities that supply our cocoa
We are partnering with some cooperatives directly in Côte d’Ivoire and Ecuador and others, through Cargill, the world's largest cocoa processor, and Olam, a global cocoa trader.
