The Cocoa Plan

Our Commitments

Over the next ten years Nestlé will invest CHF 110 million in the Plan to help improve the livelihoods of farmers and their communities, as well as enhance the sustainability and quality of cocoa grown for generations to come. This builds on the CHF 60 million invested in cocoa sustainability initiatives over the last 15 years.

To give you an idea of the key initiatives involved in The Cocoa Plan, here are some of the actions we are taking and expanding over the coming years as we continue to strive for a strong and sustainable cocoa industry.

Helping Farmers

• Farmers can benefit greatly from small changes in the way they look after their trees and harvest their crop. With farmer training, Nestlé is helping farmers increase yields, reduce disease and produce a better quality crop which attracts higher prices. We’ve been financing farmer field schools in West Africa both directly and as part of wider cocoa industry programmes for a number of years and over the next 10 we plan to train over 30,000 farmers helping to increase their earnings from cocoa
• By providing better quality, higher yielding cocoa trees which can be used to replace old, low-yielding, diseased trees we can helps farmers to improve their cocoa quality and their income, bringing benefits to themselves and their families

Nurturing a Sustainable Future

• In order to support local cocoa growing communities in the Côte d’Ivoire (where over 40% of the world’s cocoa is grown) we are enlarging the facilities at our recently opened Research and Development Centre in Abidjan. This resource has been set up to provide cocoa farmers with a million higher-yielding, stronger, cocoa trees each year from 2012
• We are also training plant scientists in other cocoa producing countries, such as Ecuador and Indonesia in accelerated cocoa trees propagation
• We work directly with cocoa cooperatives to help them and their farmers be more competitive and pay a premium for their higher quality cocoa

The Cocoa Journey

• We’re reducing the complexity of the supply chain and speeding up the processing of raw cocoa beans from the farm to export by helping cooperatives directly

Better Social Conditions

• As part of the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), we want to help ensure that children in cocoa growing communities are not exploited and have access to education
• Through partnerships such as with the Red Cross, we aim to deliver improvements in access to water and improved sanitation

Working with Partners

• In order to encourage safe and sustainable agricultural practices, Nestlé is a founding member of Utz Cerfified Cocoa which aims to develop a large scale cocoa certification system
• We support The Sustainable Tree Crops Programme that has increased income by over 20% for nearly 80,000 West African families
• We partner and assist government organisations such as the CNRA (Centre National Ivoirien de Recherche Agronomique), the partly state funded Ivorian Agricultural Research Centre that works on research in Côte d’Ivoire to improve the sustainability of cocoa farming