47. Our Third Chocolate Mini-Factory

August 6, 2023

Located in N'Douci--90 minutes from Abidjan.

End goal:  Development of a new brand--Chocolat des Villages.

Immediate goal:  to make cocoa-growing economically viable by bringing the cocoa farmer up the value chain.

Monday--Meeting with Technoserve.  Tuesday--N'Douci:  setting up the mini-factory.  Wednesday:  retrieve money to pay electrician;  trip to Issia.  Thursday--entire day at SOCOPLAN.  Friday--SCAP in Pezoan.  Saturday--production in N'Douci;  description of many challenges.  Sunday--How Klaus saved the day;  Tempering and molding class;

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Tom Newhouse. This is podcast number 47, and I have entitled it Our Third Chocolate Mini Factory. As you may know, we built our first chocolate minifactory in Depa Côte d'Ivoire in 2013, our second minifactory in Pesouin in 2016. And now thanks to two grants that we received last December, we were able to purchase and ship equipment and pay for travel expenses to set up our third chocolate factory, which is located in Indusi, a town that is about an hour and a half northwest of the big city Abidjan. This podcast is all about the trip that Peggy Bates, a member of the board of Project Hope and Fairness, and I, Tom Newhouse, the CEO, took starting on Sunday, June 11th of this year. Actually, we had planned two trips back in December, and the second one is slated for some time in September or October. The second trip will be to work with a to develop a relationship with the government of Côte d'Ivoire, with a nonprofit, and um to build a much larger um system of making chocolate in villages and shipping them and selling them. I'm hoping that the brand will be called something like chocolat de village or village chocolate. And again, it's chocolate that's made in the village and then sold throughout Côte d'Ivoire, uh in Africa, and in Europe and the United States. That's the ultimate goal. The goal of this trip, trip one, that this podcast is about, was to establish our third chocolate factory and then to visit the two existing factories in Depas and Pesoin. Our goal is to make cocoa growing economically viable by bringing the cocoa farmer up the value chain from the very bottom where he or she merely ferments, dries, and sells cocoa beans to halfway up the chain, selling the finished products, cocoa butter, powder, and liquor, or to the top of the value chain, selling finished products like wrapped chocolate bars to individual customers. The third alternative is of course best because 100% of added value, ingredient, and labor costs remains local. That is, cocoa beans, sugar, pineapples, peanuts, and other ingredients, and production labor all benefit the village where the chocolate is produced. So we begin. We arrived in Abidjan on Sunday, June 12th at 7 p.m. Our first task was to convert our e-visas into P visas, P standing for paper. This required standing in line for a full hour, then sitting in front of a camera, and finally having our e-visa, which is a real thing, glued onto a page in our passports. Peggy and I left the visa area finally and proceeded to passport control. By that time, the passport officials were twiddling their thumbs, as all the other passengers had long since been processed and had since joined their relatives. Luckily, though, our waiting time was now five minutes instead of one hour. After whizzing through passport control, we proceeded to bag retrieval. I had two bags, one of which was full of $400 worth of chocolate molds. However, we sailed through customs as Roger, our host, had sent one of his staff to shepherd us through. Roger is the president of ONJ Ascaf, ONJ standing for non-governmental organization, an Ivorian nonprofit dedicated to helping women both in urban and rural environments. In the urban environment, ONJ Ascaf ensures that house cleaners and babysitters get treated fairly by their wealthy employers. In the rural environment, ONJ Ascaf works with women to build small businesses and works with male and female farmers to form cooperatives, all to ensure fair trade in the marketplace. By the time we exited the terminal, it was 8 p.m. And because it was the tropics, it was dark. We walked across the parking lot where we enjoyed dinner in an outdoor restaurant right across from the airport terminal. There we were, there were maybe eight of us. We ordered three poissons à la bijanese, which is grilled local fish caught in one of the local lagoons, topped with onions, blazingly hot chilies, chopped little tomatoes, and mayonnaise. You eat it with your fingers along with balls of at, which is steamed fermented cassava. This is one of my favorite dishes. And I always look forward to my first night in Côte d'Ivoire because I know I'm going to have Poisson à la Bidjanese. Whether it's across from the airport or down on the beach, it still tastes really good. We drove to Cocody, which is in northeastern uh uh Abidjan, and it's about a 40-minute drive, and checked into the Hotel La Rose Blanche, the White Rose Hotel. The next morning, Monday, we spent a couple hours talking to the group that met us that had met us at the airport, including Roger Klaus, who is the photographer and technical assistant to Roger, David and Jippe, who represented Socoplan, our first cooperative, and Zeze, David's brother, and Axel Emmanuel, who is considered by many to be Côte d'Ivoire's most accomplished chocolatier and a superb spokesman for the Ivorian chocolate industry. And finally, Jean-Joël Yao, our very talented interpreter. Just afternoon, we drove to TechnoCerve, a nonprofit that works in 35 countries, to discuss the possibility of working together on a much larger project. In this case, the project is, as I mentioned earlier, Chocolat de Village, Village Chocolates. There were 10 people at this meeting, including Jean-Michel and Alexis, both of tech of TechnoCerve, as well as a representative from the C Cesse or Conseil du Café Cacao, which manages the entire cocoa and coffee industries in Côte d'Ivoire. It was agreed that we would work on a proposal to submit to the Cesé either in September or October that would involve promoting the village chocolates brand, and that we would partner with a chocolate company, possibly a French chocolate company, which would ship and distribute village-made chocolates. Again, far higher up the value chain than Fairtrade or any other certification. The next morning, a Tuesday, we drove to Nducy, a town of 56,000, located 90 minutes northwest of Abidjan, as I mentioned earlier. This is where Roger had rented a nice house where we could base our Coco Study Center. The plan is to have a place where members of chocolate making cooperatives can visit and learn how to use chocolate making equipment, how to store chocolate, how to wrap chocolate, how to market it, and how to manage a business. We spent most of the day moving and assembling the equipment that had been picked up at Customs in the Port of Abidjan just a week prior. After studying the layout of the house, I determined which room would be assigned to the following manufacturing steps roasting, cracking and winnowing, grinding, tempering, and wrapping. We then moved the various pieces of equipment to their appropriate rooms and determined that the grinding room would need heavy-duty wiring to carry the additional electric load imposed by the big mélangeur, which grinds the cocoa beans and can do up to 100 pounds at a time. Two additional rooms were dedicated by Roger to office and teaching. No project ever goes smoothly, and in this case, the electrician informed us that he would need a couple days to run a higher power line from the pole out on the street and add the necessary electrical paraphernalia before he could even connect the grinder. So we decided that we would alter the schedule and take off to Isia, about a five-hour drive north from Ndousi. Wednesday morning we stopped at the local bank where I withdrew $836 for the electrician. We met him on our way out of town and I handed him about half that amount so he could drive his motorcycle to Abidjan and pick up the necessary part to get the job done while we were up north. We continued on the road north toward Isia, passing through villages with charming names such as Blais, Divo, Dagozabua, Lakota, Ganua, Giberua, Basi, Gignano, and finally Isia. We arrived in the late afternoon and checked into our hotel called Hotel de Versin, which is built right at the base of the great Batholith of Isia. It's a five hundred foot high upwelling of granitic magma, and now that we've hit the big time, I no longer have the time to climb up it to enjoy the glorious panorama that spreads out to the horizon. That evening we invited members of the two cooperatives that we had helped establish, Scap or Societe Cooperative Agricole de Pesouan, based in the village of Peswan, and represented by its president Servando and by Prisca, the main sales agent. By the time of this meeting, Scap had already produced and sold over 2,000 African Choco Fudge bars since January. The second cooperative is Socoplan, which stands for Societe Cooperative de Planteur. Planteur is another name for farmers. Based in Depa, it was represented at this meeting by David and Jean-Paul Bolu, who had met us at the airport. Peggy told the group about how the idea of farmers producing semi-finished and finished products is truly revolutionary. It has, she said, the capacity to bring a lot more money to the village where it can be used for improving the lives of everyone. Peggy also told them that in order for us to raise money, our donors needed to see the records of each business so they know that their fund donations, uh what their donations are being used for. She explained that it is not Tom or she that have money to fund the project. Instead, it is our job to tell the story of the chocolate uh chocolate de village and to then ask our friends, business associates, and others to give for this cause. Peggy said that growers want a tracking system that is fair. The growers want to be paid promptly and they want accountability. So this is all to foster understanding among donors and also among growers. Thursday, we spent the entire day at Sokoplan. We arrived in the morning. The building is in great shape, very clean and organized, and best of all, it smells of roasting cocoa beans. The beans are really quality compared to other beans that we've seen, indicating much better care during and after fermentation. Then we piled into their air conditioned conference room where we spent an hour making introductory remarks. Jipe Bolu started by talking about the day's activities, and then he showed us the purchasing register. We then did a tour of all the different processing areas, the roasting, the cracking and winnowing, the room with two grinders, although now it has three grinders because we donated, we just uh donated a hundred-pound capacity grinder to them. We visited the room for tempering, molding, and wrapping chocolate bars and discs. But first we had to take our shoes off in order to maintain sanitary standards. Soko Plan sells thousands of bars and discs per month at the Paris Chocolate Conference last October, where David and I spent uh three or four days together in the Ivorian booth. Uh David was recognized by other people in the booth as the only Ivorian cocoa farmer who was actually making chocolate in the village. And it all started when I uh back in 2012, when I brought a small melange in my suitcase, and together David and I made a few dozen foil wrapped discs that we distributed to local villages. The following Friday, the following day, Friday, was our day to devote to Scap, the other cooperative, um located in the second village, Peswan, not far away. We built the building back in 2016. It includes two large rooms, one for hauling rice and a second room for making chocolate. My initial plan was for Peswan to purchase chocolate from nearby Depa, but now I've come to the realization that each village should be an independent chocolate producer, as this encourages more competition as well as innovation and real sensitivity to quality of the beans. Cervando has been an enthusiastic learner from the very beginning, Cervando being the president of SCAP. I have taught him how to candy orange peels, make fudge, make peanut butter, all via YouTube videos. So for a good part of the day, Cervando and his crew made chocolate bars, and I made comments where necessary to help them improve their technique. Meanwhile, the office personnel worked with Peggy to learn how to fill out forms that we will be using in order to track, keep track of the each cooperative's progress. After a fruitful day, we drove back to Indusi. On the way, we stopped at Depa, where I tested out a refractometer that a friend had lent me. Refractometer tests sugar levels and fruits. Whatever fruit you ferment, the higher its sugar level, the more productive the fermentation. One of our goals is to help farmers improve their fermentation and techniques. In order to maximize the quality of chocolate, it is necessary to ferment hot and fast in order to produce the fruity smelling esters that make the difference between ordinary and extraordinary chocolate. A hot, fast fermentation results when you combine beans into 250 kilogram batches, and that those batches contain lots and lots of natural sugar. In two days, uh such batches will generate a lot of ethanol or alcohol, and then that ethanol after two days converts into acetic acid, and then after two more days, it turns into esters, which are the wonderful fruity flavors that you get in high-quality chocolate. So that's what we're trying to do is encourage quality. Then they make more money. After correlating readings from the refractometer with the taste of the fruit, we then bought 20 kilograms of fermented dried beans from Soko Plan so we could actually run a large batch of chocolate in the new mélangeur once we got back to Nduce. And we also bought five kilograms of fermented and roasted beans to make a dozen a few dozen chocolate bars while the big batch processed. The next day, a Saturday, we each started with a belly full of garba, G-A-R-B-A, not to be confused with garbo. Garba, not the actress, consists of a bowl of at fermented cassava, a plate of grilled tuna, and a bowl of onions and hot chilies mixed with oil. A fine breakfast for hard workers. You just roll up a ball of cassava, grab a piece of tuna and some of the onion chili mix and pop that in your mouth. Then wash it down with a mouthful of beer. Breakfast yum for champions. Unlike the garba, the rest of the day was hot and exhausting and confusing. We waited hours for the arrival of the manufacturer's representative of the cocoa. We waited hours for the arrival of the electrician, who had not turned on any of the circuits he had installed the day before. But by the end of the day, we had 15 kilograms of chocolate turning in the big machine and one kilogram and two kilograms of chocolate turning in the little Melangeur. At several points during the day, I wasn't sure we would succeed. But we didn't waste any time while awaiting the arrival of the manufacturer's rep and the electrician. We started by cracking and winnowing the five kilograms of roasted cocoa beans that David had sold us so we could make a small two kilogram batch containing 1.2 kilograms of cocoa nibs, that is cracked and winnowed bits of beans, 0.6 kilograms of unrefined sugar, and 0.2 kilograms of cocoa butter. The cracker was hand operated. The winnower consisted of a household vacuum cleaner plugged into an old circuit that pulled a vacuum on a tube, and as the bits of beans fell down, the uh vacuum uh created the uh a a wind that separated the very light uh hulls from the much heavier nibs. So the nibs fell out into a container and the bits of uh hulls were sucked up into another container. Um then the um small mélangeur was also plugged into an old household current so we could get all that done while waiting for the electrician to show up. To make the small batch, Roger, under my supervision, melted the cocoa butter in the microwave and poured it into the mélangeur. Then he gradually added the nibs. Once all the nibs had been added and were grinding away, and as the heat of the day increased, the little mélangeur started to turn itself off periodically. Uh, I knew the symptom, the motor was overheating. But it would turn on whenever the motor cooled off a bit. There's a little switch on the inside that is temperature sensitive, so you don't burn your motor up. Well, this told me one thing. We needed to buy a cheap fan to blow air onto the housing of the motor because the mélangear was not properly designed. After the electrician arrived, we still couldn't get the big Melangear to turn on. That was a little worrisome. Peggy called the manufacturer in Georgia and he walked us through it. He it turned out that the emergency off switch was just a little bit fussy. Uh, we just had to learn its personality. Jiggle it a little bit and then pop, there we go. Off we go. Within minutes, the first of our three major challenges that I was most fearful about was surmounted. Then we went on a shopping trip and bought a fan to cool off the little mé longer so that it wouldn't keep turning itself off. And we also bought a new gas regulator because the old one was designed for propane, not butane, and that's a fire hazard if you try to use it. The fan solved the cutting off problem. We turned the little mé longeur around so that the wind from the fan would penetrate the vent holes around the housing of the motor, uh, and that uh then it just cheerfully chugged away without turning off. Uh, the new grass pressure regulator likewise also worked. So then the Torre Factor man, the roast the guy from the manufacturer, was able to get that machine working. Um ultimately it took about 45 minutes to properly roast the beans. We had to um dump them into a uh turning cylinder that was heated by a long gas jet, um very primitive. Um and we uh we discovered that um well I had never done this before, so you know here I am with forty thousand dollars worth of equipment, and one of the pieces of equipment I didn't know, and the other piece I will talk about later, I didn't know it either, so we it was a little risky. Uh, but I I learned I I had watched videos and I I knew what the principles were. You have to make sure you don't over roast the beans because then even though they're easier to crack and winnow, they uh the chocolate tastes uh too roasty, too smoky. So uh you want to is it it's a fine line, uh or I call it threading the eye of a very small needle. So get it right uh and and to know that you're on you're threading the needle properly, you have to taste many samples. So you keep on running the thing. And of course, and you know, I I started tasting samples after 30 minutes of roasting. I knew it would take at least 30 minutes to roast. Uh so I I just every minute I was popping one in my mouth and biting down on it to see how whether it would crack properly. And also I wanted to know what the taste was. And uh I also showed Roger and Klaus how to do that. Once the beans met my standard, we opened the door to the uh roaster and allowed them to spill out. At this point, I found out that the way the machine was designed, there's no really good way, easy way to empty it. So it turns out that you're gonna have to make your own little wooden rake that you've thread through the exit door and scrape out the last beans so they don't ruin the batch, uh the flavor of the next batch. But I'll I'll let Roger take care of that, and we'll be back in September or October. So if there are any uh problems to troubleshoot, we can do that. Also, Jean-Joel uh has already gone to the three villages, and um he will go regularly so he can uh help them with troubleshooting various things, and most of all the financial stuff that we need to get. We transferred the beans to a piece of cardboard and spread them in a thin layer so they would cool. And of course, cooling at 100 degrees because it was 100 degrees outside, it takes a little while. So, and we you want to spread them pretty thinly. At this point, we found that the freshly roasted beans are hard to crack and winnow, even if they are properly roasted, as there's still a residual softness that causes um the cracker gears to gum up if you try to grind uh crack them when they're still warm. So we had to drop the and we had to get them cool, but that's hard to do when it's a hundred degrees uh outside the root uh the building and inside the building because there was no air conditioning at that point. Now there is. I put the cracker in the refrigerator, so we had a refrigerator, it was working, and uh also the bowl of beans, so I chilled them down so that the fat in the beans would uh crystallize and that would make the nibs fall apart when you crack them. After half an hour, um that the cracker was properly chilled and the beans uh would crack would crack properly. I also had to uh during the time uh that we were getting the uh small batch going, I had to um also get the big batch going, and so that's what we were doing is cooling down all those and to make 15 grams of 15 kilograms of chocolate. So I had to make nine kilograms of nibs in all. That required quite a bit of cracking, which is a hand operation, so it's a bit slow, uh, and so it took a while. So it was 8 p.m. and we still weren't finished with cracking in win away because it's it was too hot. So um Peggy, uh Peggy was tired, so I dropped her off at the we dropped her off at the hotel, and then we went out to eat, and I had my last dish of fish uh la Bijanese. Uh, and then we returned to the center. Uh, and while we were gone, Klaus, uh who's just uh a wonderful uh person, very hard worker, and very thoughtful, had cracked another couple kilos of beans uh so I could add them to the chocolate that was already running in the big mélangeur. And uh so that was and it was it was getting smooth and and everything was looking good. So uh by 10 o'clock, we were we were done. Uh and uh we we went back to the hotel and let the machine run overnight. The next day was Sunday, we arrived to find both of the mélangeurs, the little one and the big one, spinning away. During the night, uh both had quit due to a power outage. Fortunately, Klaus, who was sleeping on the tile floor in the next room, had restarted the machines, and he was a light sleeper and he was very conscientious. So, once again, my hat is off to Klaus. He's going to be a real asset. It was time for tempering and molding class. That is showing uh Klaus, Joger, and Antoine how to temper chocolate and then how to properly mold it. First, I started by emptying the small mélangeur into a bowl. So the whole purpose of the small mélangeur was to get it going and get a small batch going so we could play around with it. Because the big mélangeur takes longer. So I showed Klaus Gorget and Antoine how to make uh the temperatures, how to take the chocolate the chocolate's temperature using the thermometer gun that we had bought. This is a gun that he used for taking people's temperature, um, and it just shoots out a little bit of um uh an ex an uh a um a red light um that uh measures the the temperature. It's very good, very fast. Um doesn't work with transparent fluids, but it works very well with opaque fluids like chocolate. Um I showed them how to uh pull the chocolate out of the big mélangeur by removing the cotter pin and and tilting the whole bowl, which weighed uh probably two or three hundred pounds. Uh so it's um it's pretty uh scary. Um, but it's a very solidly built piece of machinery, and so if you're careful, everything works out just fine. Um, I put some of the um bigger batch in the new tempering machine, uh, but I couldn't figure out how to use it. So uh they now know how to use it. So Jean-Joel went back uh a couple weeks later and talked to the um people who sold us the tempering machine, and uh and also I sent him videos of using it. So they figured it out, so that was good. Anyway, uh I did manage to get the tempering machine to uh the vibrator to work, which is critical because you want to vibrate the molds to get all the air bubbles out so that your your chocolate bars don't look like Swiss cheese. These are plastic, hard plastic molds, the ones that I brought in my suitcase. And I showed them that uh, and then you put the molds in the refrigerator uh to uh knock some of the temperature, some of the heat out of them, out of the chocolate. And then uh halfway through you pull them out and look at them, and you can see that the chocolate is pulling away from the plastic, which is a sign that the chocolate is well tempered. So I showed them how to monitor that uh to make sure that the chocolate is actually going to pop out of the mold, because if the chocolate is not properly tempered, it will not uh pop out of the mold well. In fact, sometimes it won't do it at all, and that's very bad because then you have to throw away all that chocolate, you have to soak the mold, and and and it's a big mess. Uh so it's very important to get the temper correct correct. Tempering means that there are five five, there are six actually uh crystals, fat crystals in chocolate in cacao, um, and uh they all melt at a different temperature, and you need to get three out of the six uh crystals to form. It's still quite fluid, and at that point the crystallization will continue. Um, but if you don't get those first three crystal types to form through proper cooling and stirring, uh then uh the chocolate will not unmold and you will have a big mess and you will waste a lot of valuable product. Um, so you see the when you pull it out of the fridge, you can see it pulling away from the plastic, and you put it back in the refrigerator and then let it go until you can you pull them out, and you can see that all the chocolate has pulled away completely from the plastic. Um, it's quite easy to see. We pop them out, they just pop right out if the chocolate is properly tempered. Uh, and we'd wrapped a couple dozen discs and bars in foil. So I showed them how to do that, and then it's now up to Roger to develop the proper paper wrapping for each of the products, and that's what we're doing right now. Um, we're talking to Roger about the design of the wrapping, which we want to represent uh equality of gender, um, and uh also so we'd have a male and a female on the front label and a cocoa tree. That's what we're sort of thinking uh it will look like. Uh but that that they're they're they're the ones who have to work with a printer and get it designed. Anyway, that's happening right now. Um, so it was Sunday and we'd finished our jobs and it was around 2 p.m. So we ate lunch, went to the hotel, showered, because you know, at 100 degrees uh you need to shower regularly, and then we headed southeast back toward Abidjan. We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. I spent an hour and a half in line. Uh Peggy went off on uh she had another flight, and uh so I said goodbye to her, and and um I had to wait in line for an hour and a half, which was not easy because you know 73-year-old legs and feet don't work the way they used to. Uh, and then once I checked in, I went back out in the front room and spent another 45 minutes with Roger and with uh the president of the YGA cooperative that is going to be working with us on this project. Well, all in all, it was a very productive trip. Everything, uh as they say, all's well that ends well. It uh there were lots of uncertainty, there was lots of uncertainty. Uh, and uh, but we we managed to solve a lot of problems. And I think uh Roger and his crew are going to do a fine job. Anyway, I want to thank all the donors and um also the members of the Project Hope and Fairness Board for their support and also for thanks to Peggy, who added so much more to the trip. Uh, this is my 15th trip, and uh this was really we got so much done, and uh Peggy was just really important to really making a lot of progress, not only on the production side of things, that's you know, where I can do I'm fine just by myself doing that, but the uh the financial and management sides that is much more complicated and uh not really my cup of tea. Uh uh, so she was very good at that, and that's great. So, as uh Don, who is um on our board says onward and upward, which translated into Greek means is uh excelsior, but also excelsior means wood shavings. Um, however, uh in this case excelsior means onward and upward, so that's our motto. Thank you for listening, and um we'll uh get be back soon with more progress. Things are really looking good. Thank you so much for all your support. Bye bye.