33. Project Redwood Grant; Establishment of SCAP and Project Espoir et Equité

May 15, 2022

Report on fundraiser in September of 2021.  Individual donations.  

Two Projects Funded by a Project Redwood Grant:  1, Depa will be pressing cocoa liquor to extract cocoa butter and the press cake will be ground into cocoa powder;  2, Founding of SCAP (Société Coopérative Agricole de Pezoan).  Pezoan will buy Depa chocolate and focus on fudge-filled chocolate bars.

Establishment of Project Espoir et Equité, founded to manufacture chocolate products and sell wholesale to local retail stores such as supermarkets and restaurants.  We will manufacture in Foyer du Segala.  Description of products.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:40

That was Prelude in E major by Frederick Chopin, Opus twenty-eight, number nine. Chopin composed uh over twenty-four preludes, and uh they uh tended to alternate between slow and fast. That was a largo, slow, and it's in the major key, so it's rather cheerful. Hello, this is Tom Newhouse once again, and this is podcast number thirty-three. And the subject of today's podcast is uh about all the stuff that has happened since the last one, which was um last December, and so here we are in mid-May of 2022, uh, and we have some new and exciting information uh to tell you about. Last September, Project Hope and Fairness had a bang up fundraiser. We rented the fabulous Cal Poly Performing Arts Center in San Luis Obispo, California, and we blended Bach pipe organ music with videos of Ivorian cocoa farmers. Over 100 attendees enjoyed the show, bought chocolate, and ate a chocolate mousse cake, all made from chocolate produced in the small factory that we had built in Daypuck, Ivory Coast back in 2013. At the fundraiser, we raised$15,000. On top of that success, one of our annual donors, who was unable to attend the event, pledged an amount equivalent to the amount we had raised. So by early October of 2021, we had added$30,000 to our bank account. And what's more, one member of our board donated over$4,000 to cover the rent of the venue. During the same period, thanks to the tireless efforts of another member of our board, we received a$30,000 grant from Project Redwood. A nonprofit established by alumni of the Stanford Business School, Project Redwood assists small nonprofits that address global poverty by engaging in social entrepreneurship. Well that fits us to a T. We at Project Hope and Fairness address the poverty of the West African cocoa farmer who earns less than$300 per year while providing more than two-thirds of the world's cocoa beans. The average West African cocoa farmer earns a mere 4% of a chocolate bar's retail price. If he or she sells the beans fair trade, he stands to gain only 1% more, or 5% of the chocolate bar's retail price. But with the Project Redwood grant, we are helping the cocoa farmers of two Ivorian villages, Depa and Pesuan, earn far more than these low numbers. By the end of 2022, Sokoplan, the cocoa cooperative located in Depa, will not only be supplying us and other customers with dark and milk chocolate bars, but thanks to the Project Redwood money, the cooperative will also be pressing unsweetened chocolate, otherwise known as chocolate liquor, to extract out half the cocoa butter and then grate the pressed cake to make cocoa powder. Africa has almost one billion inhabitants, many of whom are regular consumers of Milo, a Nestle cocoa beverage, made of Ivorian beans that have been transported to Europe, ground, pressed, and grated into a cocoa beverage mix, then exported back to Africa. Exporting beans to Europe for processing is a remnant of the colonial period when Africa was considered to be a source of raw materials and not a source of finished product. Our plan is to show that converting cocoa beans into hot cocoa powder mixes at the village level will contribute far more money to the local community than just by selling beans. And instead of using boring Western flavors, we plan to make cocoa mixes featuring African flavors such as black pepper and ginger or baobab. The second project funded by the Project Redwood grant focuses on helping Pesouan, the other village, become a chocolate producer like DEPA. Just last week, some of the Project Redwood money that we had received was used to found a second agricultural cooperative called SCAP or Societe Cooperative Agricole de Pesouin. That is agricultural cooperative of Pesouan. While DEPA focuses on making bars and cocoa mixes, Pesouan will purchase chocolate from DEPA and make bars filled with Fudge along with a local fruit or nut. We chose Fudge because it is made with condensed milk, a dairy product that is easily available in local stores as it does not require refrigerated storage. Thanks to WhatsApp and videos made from my cell phone, I have been able to train members of the SCAP Cooperative in how to fill a chocolate mold, then immediately empty it, creating a shell that one can then fill with fudge and a flavor ingredient. The fudge is made by microwaving condensed milk, sugar, butter, and melted chocolate. The chocolate shells are half filled with fudge and then topped with local ingredients such as vanilla, coffee, peanuts with peanut butter, candied orange peel, or candied pineapple. Eventually we plan to add other tropical fruits such as guava, plantains, jackfruit, and ginger. Late last year, I established a second nonprofit called Projet Espoir et Equité. This is a French nonprofit. Four years ago, my wife Eve and I retired to southern France. This presented the unique opportunity to focus on the European and British markets while reducing the costs associated with traveling to West Africa. I quickly found that it is better to have a French nonprofit that can freely do business in France and other EU countries. Now both nonprofits, Proje Espoire Equité and Project Hope and Fairness, focus on different tasks. Project Hope and Fairness assists villages to establish agricultural cooperatives, purchases machinery, and trains staff in chocolate manufacture and use. But the French equivalent focuses on developing a direct trade market for village-made products. And direct trade, by the way, has nothing to do with fair trade. Direct trade is where I use my cell phone to make an order, and you actually get the finished product directly from the village and not through a bunch of middlemen and all kinds of associated costs, such as you find with normal uh the normal trade or uh fair trade. In late December of last year, I formed the French nonprofit. We started with seed money from Project Hope and Fairness, and we signed a lease agreement with the Foyer du Segala, another nonprofit that runs classes intended to help immigrants such as Ukrainians and Africans find gainful employment in France. The Foyer is a building constructed about 50 years ago in nearby Lage P, a lovely medieval town complete with a ruined castle. And our building, which is uh, as I say, only 50 years old, uh has a modern commercial kitchen. We pay 220 euros per month to manufacture chocolate in the kitchen on Mondays and Tuesdays. We also rent a small room for dry storage. In the short term, Projet Espoir et Equité will manufacture all the chocolates sold in the EU and UK that we will be selling in the EU and UK. But as the two villages gain in manufacturing ability, some of those products that are currently made in our facility will be exported directly from the villages. Since last December, David Logbo Zigro, the president of Sokol Plan, which is located in Depa, has been mailing me three-pound blocks of dark or milk chocolate, and we have developed over 30 products in six categories African Choco Fudge bars, African Choco Bars, chocolate beans, African pinuche, speculos, and African truffles. In the fudge filled bar category, we manufacture the bars that I described previously. They are called again African Choco Fudge Bars. In the solid chocolate bar category, this is the bars made in Depa, but uh right now we're making them. We make African choco bars that come in 70%, 80%, and 100% bittersweet, and 55% milk chocolate. This means that a 70% bar weighing 100 grams would contain 30 grams of sugar. That's what the percentage means. Uh and 80%, of course, would only contain 20 grams of sugar, and 100% contains no grams of sugar. It's just 100% pate cacao, which we call an English cocoa liquor. We also make candied ginger bars with thin slices of candied ginger, pink peppercorn bars sprinkled over the chocolate, roasted salted peanut bars, toasted almond bars, dried lavender bars, and shredded orange peel bars. The 55% milk chocolate bar is a chocolatey version of milk chocolate. Most milk chocolate is more like uh 20%, and this is 55. So it's very chocolatey. There's a certain uh but the bitterness of the bean is toned down by the addition of the milk powder. Also, milk powder adds a rich caramel note. Our third category of products is chocolate beans, which we sell in 60 gram bags. Um we use coffee bean molds and uh the resulting coffee beans, which we call chocolate beans because they are made out of chocolate, uh, they each weigh one gram. So they're fairly light. It's very uh not a whole lot of food. Um they come in dark 70%, milk 55%, toasted almond, cardamom, praline, and orange peel. These beans are really good for serving next to a cup of coffee or tea. The hot beverage warms one's palate and melts the chocolate, melding the flavors of the chocolate and the beverage together. These beans are perfect for high-end tea and coffee houses. Our fourth category, pinoche africain, come in 50 gram bags containing four chocolate in robe pinoche, each filled with a different nut pecan, peanut, hazelnut, or walnut. Pinoche are basically a vanilla flavored fudge made with cream, butter, sugar, molasses, salt, and vanilla. One boils the syrup to the softball stage, approximately 140 degrees Fahrenheit, when cools it to room temperature, and then one mixes until the syrup crystallizes, which and then produces a fudge-like consistency. We fashion balls with this fudge-like material that contain the nut, and then we dip them in bittersweet chocolate. Our fifth category is speculos du village depa. Speculose is a spice cookie that is highly prized in Holland and Belgium. In France, it is often served as an accompaniment to coffee. We cut the cookies into one inch squares, bake them until crisp, then fill a mold with three grams of molten chocolate in each impression, and then push the cookie into the chocolate. If you've ever enjoyed the French cookie called petit écolier, you know what a pleasure it is to crunch down on a crispy butter cookie while melding that with chocolate. Our sixth category is truffles, which we sell in boxes of 16, 9, or 4, or we also wrap them in foil and sell them in craft paper bags with windows. The boxes are not shipped because too much damage is incurred during shipping. But the bags sell ship very well. We make up to eight different truffle flavors, including hazelnut, ginger, cranberry, banana coconut, peanut, coffee, marchipon, and candied orange peel. Right now, most of our packaging is in is in French because that's where we're selling it. It has barcodes and sell-by dates, which make it possible to sell in stores. The French consumer is more sensitive to whether products are produced locally, so big grocery store chains make a point of advertising their local products. Last Friday I visited three hypermarkets in Albi, which is a nearby city, and dropped off samples and literature. The literature includes a small booklet which describes our history and the villages that we work with and the products that we manufacture. I have also marketed the chocolates in restaurants and coffee and tea bars and in stores known as épiceries, which is the French word for delicatessen, which is what we call them in English. And these épiceries often feature local products. Other marketing efforts include giving piano recitals, at which I talk about our efforts to empower cocoa farmers. One piano recital is entitled Chopin Chocolat et Champagne. I'm doing one of those Chopin Chocolat et Champagne recitals in a beautiful old country house on July 2nd or 3rd. Don't know the exact date yet. And it's uh it's quite an extraordinary venue. A final word about where we are in our efforts to make our two projects a reality. I visited the two villages, um, Depa and Pesoin late last February, and I spent a day in each village troubleshooting. Depa had just received the cocoa press. We ran an eight kilogram test batch and squeezed out two kilograms of cocoa butter. Since then, we are working on getting a better yield of cocoa butter, uh, which is used as an emollient and is therefore a desirable local product for hair and skincare. And I'm talking about local product in West Africa, not here. Um, the cocoa butter is also used, will also be used in chocolate production at the Depa plant. Meanwhile, the cocoa grating machine, which we ordered last um December, uh and we're going to it's going to be used to shred the press cake that comes out of the pr the press into cocoa powder. That machine is sitting in the port of Antwerp waiting for a berth on a ship headed for Abidjan. We have completed all the paperwork, so it's only a matter of time before DAPA produces its first cocoa mix. After all these details about our efforts at selling chocolate in the US and in the EU, you might be wondering about chocolate sales in Africa. Actually, Silco Plan sells the majority of its chocolate as bars and discs in local communities and for local events. For example, the DAPA cooperative makes chocolate bars for weddings. The wrapper features a picture of the happy couple. In neighboring Pesoin, we founded their cooperative just last week. Now they need to establish a bank account that will accept American dollars. And once that's done, we will send them a thousand bucks to purchase and install an air conditioning system for the larger chocolate production room and also to purchase a second refrigerator so that when they make the African Choco Fudge Bar, they can store them under conditions that will keep the fudge from crystallizing and hardening. This week we will order the tempering machine for Peswan, and by October, Peswan will be able to ship us 1800 African Choco Fudge bars. All this to say there is light at the end of the tunnel. When we do our next fundraiser in November or December of this year, we will have lots of African Choco bars and African Choco fudge bars for sale. Empowering cocoa farmers to make their own chocolate brings West African cocoa farmers up the cocoa value chain, meaning if this trend continues, there will be more money in their pockets. And with more money comes more educational opportunities for their children and better treatment of their land and the environment. Thank you. That's the end of podcast number thirty-three. And look forward to talking to you next time. We go out with another prelude. This is number five of Frederick Chopin.