39. Participating in the Ivorian Booth at the Salon du Chocolat

November 5, 2022

Five days in the Ivorian booth, talking to visitors.

Description of the building

The burgeoning B2B (Bean-to-bar) market.  The tools of the B2B trade.  Melangeur companies.

Pioneers:  John Nanci, John Scharffenberger, Frederick Schilling

The CCC--Conseil du Café-Cacao

Need for Côte d'Ivoire to diversify its market--to quality chocolate.

History of SOCOPLAN;  Types of chocolate manufactured.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:00

The sounds you just heard are from the napkin git dance, part of the joy of working in the large booth of the Conseil de Cafe Cacao at the Salon du Chocolat, which I attended from october twenty eighth through november first at the Par des Exposition located at the Port de Versailles on the outskirts of Paris. Each morning, the doors to the event opened at ten AM and it went mercilessly all day until the doors closed at 7 PM. During that nine hour period, David Logbo Zigro and I stood at the counter of Artisan Chocolatiers in the Ivorian booth and talked incessantly of our joint project which we had started in 2012. We spelled out each other for bio breaks as well as research breaks. During a research break, I would walk around to get a general feel for the place and then zero in on specific booths of interest. The building itself was maybe 200 by 400 feet, so about 80,000 square feet. There were two floors. The bottom floor featured the burgeoning bean to bar market, a refreshing change from the past when most salons featured big chocolate and medium-sized houses that bought chocolate from the big boys and then melted it and molded it. But this year change was in the air. Eighty percent of the ground floor was devoted to the bean to bar movement, characterized by small producers, often one person producing and another person selling. The small producers typically buy cocoa beans directly from the farmers or through brokers who deal directly with the farmers or with farming cooperatives. Off to the right was an area reserved to machine manufacturers. These are not house size behemoths, what the big chop big chocolate industry would use, but laboratory size, which is more appropriate for small business. They included crackers, winnowers, mélangeurs, panners, and inrobers. In short, the tools of the bean to bar trade. To make chocolate, fermented dried cocoa beans are first sorted to remove detritus, then roasted, cracked, and winnowed. The result of these four operations is nibs, fragments of cocoa beans. The mélangeur is a key part of the entire operation as it converts the nibs into chocolate. Interestingly, the mélangeur is key to understanding the bean to bar movement. Three of the largest manufacturers of méelangeurs are owned and staffed by South Indians. Why? Because a half century ago, South Indian homemakers started grinding their fermented rice bean pastes for making their idlis and dosai with electric wet mills. Idlis are spongy, delicately flavored breakfast breads that you dip in various spicy sambals. Dosai are rolled up crepes and are often filled with potatoes and chilies. Thanks to the imagination of Ashwin Kumar of Spectra, a South Indian manufacturer of wet grinders, he adapted the machines by adding black granite stones, Teflon bushings, and stainless steel to make machines that could handle running 48 hours on a batch of chocolate. And the rest, as they say, is history, because now there are three Indian companies, Spectra, Coco Town, and DCM, and there are even more non-Indian mélangeur companies. There's a lot more to the Bean to Bar story than just the development of a machine, however. People are also part of the movement. For decades, John Nancy of Chocolatealchemy.com taught budding, freshly minted chocolate makers how to select, roast, and grind beans to make chocolate that was easily as good as anything made by the best chocolate manufacturers. John Scharfenberger, who started with a little mélangeur in his home kitchen, built it into Scharfenberger chocolates, which was purchased by Hershey years ago. Frederick Schilling, the founder of Dagobah, developed a line of excellent organic chocolate bars. He also started with a countertop mélanger. And similar to Scharfenberger, Dagoba was also picked up by Hershey. In fact, I saw Frederick Schilling one the day he made the sale. We were both attending the World Cocoa Foundation meeting in Washington, DC. Some guy standing in the corner of the room, turns out it was Frederick Schilling, kept popping out crazy remarks. I was thinking to myself, either his meds are out of balance or he just sold his business. It was the latter. In the interest of focusing on the salon, we dropped the story there and returned to the entrance to the building. Off to the left was an enormous area reserved for the production of chocolate sculptures. One might call it the Chocolate Olympics because lots of very talented artists, technicians were manufacturing amazingly beautiful artistic creations out of chocolate. The wall dividing it from the main room was dotted with insets displaying large, impressively executed chocolate sculptures. Although sorely tempted to enter and discover more, I chose to focus on the bean to bar movement. That's what I was there for. About 70% of the remainder of the ground floor was devoted to the booths of small chocolate makers. Most were grouped by country. There were booths for Madagascar, Ghana, Cameroon, Fernando Po, Thailand, Côte d'Ivoire, Trinidad, Jamaica, Brazil, Peru, and many more. Toward the back of the room was the booth of the CCC or Cafe du Conseil Conseil du Cafe Cacao, which stand which and this is the organization that controls the coffee and cocoa industry of Côtivo. Côtivo is only number fourteen in world coffee production, but it used to be number three. And but it's still number one in world cocoa production. Côte d'Ivoire may never get back to its pinnacle as number three, partly because it is stuck growing low cost, low class, robusta coffee used to make instant coffee and coffee flavorings. Similarly, in order for Côte d'Ivoire to retain its number one spot in cocoa, it needs to diversify its market. In the past, Côte d'Ivoire meekly provided totally cheap beans for the supermarket chocolate bars that have so efficiently expanded the wastelines of Americans and Europeans while taking advantage of child labor to keep the cheap chocolate cheap. To diversify, Côte d'Ivoire needs to become a player in the market of quality chocolate. That's where David and Project Open Fairness come in. We are trying to make chocolate production happen in the village, not in the industrial sector of a city. We are trying to link a quality product made with carefully selected, carefully roasted, and ground cocoa beans to consumers who are willing to pay more for a better product. And because of David's hard work since we began working together in 2013, that's why he and I were provided 18 inches of the Artisan Chocolatier's counter to show that chocolate made in a 40 kilogram batch can compete with chocolate made in a 4,000 kilogram batch. On our counter that we shared were three artisans displaying their bars. We showed that small business has a role to play in diversifying the market. For five days, David and I stood at the counter and provided samples of our products and talked about them. David showed off bags of cocoa nibs, whole peeled cocoa beans, cocoa powder, jars of cocoa butter, and four different chocolate bars. The cocoa powder and cocoa butter that he promoted were made possible by two grants that were given to uh to him and to Project Hope and Fairness. One was from the USDA, which allowed for the purchase of a cocoa press. And the second grant came from Project Redwood, uh, which uh last year's gave us$30,000 for two projects. And this this grant made it possible to purchase a grater with which Soco Plan employees were able to grate the press cake into cocoa powder. David's cocoa butter and powder compare very favorably to the cocoa and butt powder and butter sold in other parts of the Ivorian stand. Both his powder and butter are quite fragrant compared to the other products, which are quite bland. This demonstrates how quality results when one selects out the best beans and ferments and dries them carefully. And this can be done only in a village, not in a giant factory. I showed off a number of products that I sell through Project Project Espoirs et Equite. That's the French equivalent to Project Open Fairness. I started it a year ago. I had found that I could neither uh I could not function as Project Hope and Fairness in France. I could not establish a bank account, I could not buy insurance, I could not rent a facility as an American nonprofit. So I established a French nonprofit, which is called Projet Espoir et Iquité, which means in French Project Hope and Fairness. Among the products that I sampled and discussed, all made with David's bittersweet milk and baking chocolate, baking chocolate being 100%, no sugar, were six different chocolate bars. The African Choco Fudge bars available in candied orange peel, candied pineapple, vanilla buttercream, coffee buttercream, hazelnut, and peanut. I showed off two African cocoa truffle assortments with eight different flavors in all. Hazelnut, coffee, marzipan, and orange peel in the classic assortment of African truffles, and uh cranberry, candy, ginger, peanut, and coconut banana in what I call the Explorers assortment. I also sampled out speculos cookies in chocolate, African Panucci balls coated in bittersweet, and six different flavors of cocoa tasting beans. All my products are currently made by myself and Damien, my assistant, at a commercial kitchen that we rent 20 minutes from where I live. The plan is to develop sufficient sales volume that sometime in 2023, uh some of those products will be made either by SOCO Plan or by SCAP, SCAP being the Societe Cooperative de Pesouin, our second chocolate producing village. A few details about David and its cooperative, SOCOPlan. David and I started working together back in 2012 when we built a rice hulling facility and chocolate room in the village of Depa, where David lived. The rice hauling facility saved several hundred women the back breaking labor of pounding rice for two hours each day for the evening meal. And the lunch, the chocolate room was an experiment. It was quite small, and I just spent a little bit of money on it because I wanted to find out if we could make village chocolate together. In 2013, I brought a spectra mélangeur in my suitcase, and David and I spent several days together making bittersweet chocolate discs and chocolate bars, which we shared with surrounding villages. In the subsequent years, David has built new facilities and I have raised money to buy machines, install electricity, pay for building supplies, and pay for construction labor. In 2019, with Project Open Fairness Funding, David established the Cooperative SOCO Plan, which stands for Societe Cooperative des Planteurs. That same year, David was awarded a$60,000 grant by a USDA funded project called Mocha, which stood for Maximizing Opportunities in Cocoa Activity. With that money, he built a new cocoa bean processing facility in the village of Depa, purchased the cocoa butter press, several air conditioners, and was awarded a totally new air-conditioned pickup truck. Since then, David has appeared at a number of chocolate and cocoa events around Côte d'Ivoire and has gained the respect of many of the staff at the CCC, the Conseil du Cafe Cacao, I mentioned before, which is a branch of the Ivorian Ministry of Agriculture, and it's housed in a 20-story building in Abidjan devoted just to the CCC. It literally controls Côte d'Ivoire's biggest business. Here's a little day in the life of a Soco Plan cocoa bean. It begins on the farm of a Soco plan member. The average cocoa tree produces 40 pods per year, and in each pod there are approximately 40 beans. The farmer carefully cuts ripe pods off his or her trees, cracks them open with a stout stick, and scoops the beans out. These are pulled apart to separate them from the surrounding placental tissue, which is discarded, and the beans are piled up and covered with banana leaves. For three days, lactic acid bacteria ferment the surrounding tissue, and the heat generated cooks the beans, kills them, and produces valuable chocolate flavor precursors. After three days, the farmer opens the pile, which is steaming hot and stirs it to distribute the heat. After three more days of fermentation, the heat subsides and the beans are hauled back to the village, where they are spread on mats to dry under the sun. Drying takes up to two weeks and the beans must reach 6% moisture in order to inhibit mold formation and insect growth. At this point, the SoCo plan farmer takes the dried beans to the cooperative where they are inspected and sold at a premium price because good beans means good flavor. Next, a Soco plan employee pulls out extraneous materials and bad beans and roasts the beans at around 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Roasting dries the beans further, loosens the skin, and sterilizes the insides. The skins can be peeled off individually, which is a little labor-intensive, or the beans can be cracked and winnowed, resulting in bean bits known as nibs in English or a c a claw in French. The nibs are then ground to about 100 microns in size, and then the resulting pot de cacao or chocolate liquor, as it is called in English, is combined with sugar in the mélangeur at a rate of seven kilograms of pot to three kilograms of sugar if you're making a 70% bittersweet. If you're making a 60% milk chocolate, then the recipe is six grams, six kilograms of pot to one kilogram of milk powder to three kilograms of sugar. I purchase all three types of chocolate from David. Right now he mails me the chocolate in packages of two kilograms, which means that I don't have to pay any duties to the French customs officials. At some point, however, we will have to import David's chocolate in larger quantities, hopefully by boat, in order to decrease transportation costs. In about a month, our other partner, Peswin, it's a village, not far from Depa, David's village, will be online for chocolate production. Today they just picked up their tempering machine, which we had shipped to them about six months ago. They buy chocolate from David, which is uh in uh, of course, Soco Plant's chocolate, um, and they will be making African Choco Fudge bars, which will be available for export to the United States. These are our hottest-selling products because each bar has a fudge filling along with a fruit or nut. I hope this description of our considerable efforts to de-industrialize and diversify chocolate has helped you understand where Project Hope and Fairness is headed. Please consider attending our annual fundraising event to be held at the Monday Club from 5.30 to 8 o'clock p.m. on Thursday, December 1st. The Monday Club is located at 1815 Monterey Street in San Luis Obispo at the corner of Monterey and Grand Avenues. Price of entrance is$75 per person. The program will feature tapas and village confections created with bean to bar chocolate. There will be a progress report that features videos of cocoa growing and chocolate production, as well as interviews with important chocolate officials who discuss how what we are accomplishing. To learn more, please visit our webpage at Project Hope and Fairness, all one word.org. We end the podcast with the sounds of drumming that accompanied the famous Zauli Dance, Z-A-O-U-L-I. Zauli Dance, which is performed by in the villages of the Guru people who live in Central Côte d'Ivoire. Talk to you next time and hopefully we will see you at the fundraising event.