Tom's Podcast
Tom's Podcast
51. Learn the Bittersweet Truth About Chocolate
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December 14, 2023
An interview with Dave Congalton on KEBC in San Luis Obispo. Peggie Pappathakis and I talked about the industry, including worst forms of child labor, child slavery and the poverty of the. cocoa farmer.
We also talked about the Bean To Bar industry.
Write to me at twneuhaus@gmail.com
To learn more, visit http://www.projecthopeandfairness.org
Hi, this is Tom Newhouse, podcast number fifty-one. Um, the title of it is Learn the Bittersweet Truth About Chocolate. On December 12th, Dr. Peggy Papatakis and I, Tom Newhouse, did an interview at a local radio station, KVEC, here in San Luis Obispo, California. The host of the show was Dave Congleton, one of the most popular interviewers on the Central Coast of California. Entitled Learn the Bittersweet Truth About Chocolate, this was my third or fourth time on the Dave Congleton show, and Peggy and I did the interview to promote our mini fundraiser, which is taking place tomorrow, Friday, December 15th. It will be held at the House of Brad, located at 1025 Farmhouse Lane, across from the entrance to the airport on Broad Street. The event will happen from 4 to 6 PM. We hope you can join us. There's lots of chocolate for sale in exchange for a donation to our worthy cause, which is to help Coco Farmers and Cookie War make a decent living. As always, we are looking to help the farmers join the revolution by donating to the cause. Go to www.projecthopeandfairness.org and click on the donate button. Or send the check to donations. Also you can write to me at Tom at Project Hope and Fairness.org. Okay, I hope you enjoy the show.
SPEAKER_02At that time of year, a lot of chocolate floating around. Uh my two guests joining us in studio now represent a group called Project Open Fairness, big event coming up on Friday. They're here to uh talk about the bittersweet truth about chocolate.
SPEAKER_01Hmm.
SPEAKER_02Uh we welcome back to this broadcast, Dr. Tom Newhouse. He has brought with him Dr. Peggy Popathakis. Good afternoon to you both. Thanks for being here. Tom, it's been a while. Take a minute, remind people who you are professionally.
SPEAKER_00Well, I taught at Cal Poly uh and I'm retired. I live in France. Um and but I still have my original uh job with Project Open Fairness, which I established in 2006. And it was to help the cocoa farmers uh make a decent living off of in a business that is very difficult for them to make a decent living.
SPEAKER_02Peggy, what should we know about you, please?
SPEAKER_03Um so I am recently retired from Cow Poly. Uh my area of interest and expertise is in nutrition, so I taught nutrition, and then I conducted research in Africa on trying to improve the nutritional status of populations there.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell uh a lot to talk about, but let's make sure we remind people about Friday. What's happening this Friday from 4 to 6 p.m.
SPEAKER_03So at House of Bread, they have generous generously offered to provide us with 50% of all their proceeds of food and drink. So we will be there from 4 to 6 p.m. Tom will be available to talk about chocolate, and uh another board member and myself will be uh pouring the drinks for them, and we'll have some wonderful chocolate that we brought some there for you, some of our village chocolate available for donation.
SPEAKER_02All right, this is the house of bread, not the one downtown.
SPEAKER_03Correct, it's the one across from the airport.
SPEAKER_02All right, right there on Farmhouse Lane.
SPEAKER_03Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Four to six p.m. Yes. Any price to get in?
SPEAKER_03Nope, it's free. Um you can come and you buy whatever you'd buy anyway. Um for food and drink. We get 50%. Project Hope in Fairness gets 50% of the proceeds. And then Tom brought lots of chocolate that is produced in those villages so uh people can taste how wonderful it is, and we can make some proceeds.
SPEAKER_02Tom, uh anything else you'd add to that description?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, come and taste what it uh chocolate that really um is about as good as chocolate can get. Um they're using machines that we supplied them, and uh they're making a very smooth and flavorful product.
SPEAKER_02All right, so let me just use myself as a test case here. You were kind enough, you brought me five little chocolate bars. Who can tell me about what I'm about to enjoy?
SPEAKER_00Well, you have five different flavors. You have dark chocolate 70%, you have milk chocolate 55%, you have dark chocolate with cocoa nibs, you have dark chocolate with candied orange peel, and you have dark chocolate with candied ginger. The oranges and the ginger are from the village. The chocolate is from the village.
SPEAKER_02So why is this chocolate any different than what I could get at Trader Joe's?
SPEAKER_00Um this is made by cocoa farmers in the village. Um there's been all kinds of efforts to help cocoa farmers, such as Fair Trade. Uh, but basically, a regular and fair trade give them about four to five percent of the retail dollar. That means out of one dollar, four to five cents. And we're offering 40 cents. That's ten times as much because they're making it in the village, they're making it with their own ingredients, their own sugar, their own everything, their own labor.
SPEAKER_03I was just gonna add to that is that the cocoa farmers they make this wonderful or they grow what becomes a wonderful product, but they live in abject poverty. And so there's something wrong with that system that all the farmers are are living at below poverty level. And in fact, child labor provides a lot of the work to produce chocolate. And so in the villages that we work with, we're building to empower them to gain new skills beyond farming, producing chocolate, and then making a a living wage.
SPEAKER_02Where can I get this chocolate, Tom?
SPEAKER_00Um at this point, you can contact us and we can supply it to you.
SPEAKER_02Oh, but I mean I can't walk into a store currently.
SPEAKER_00At this point, no. We're um they're selling it uh near their villages and all and in Abidjan, the big city. Um so they're selling it locally there. But here's the big problem that we're working on solving, and that is transportation. It costs us 75 cents to ship a bar from Ivory Coast to the United States. Um if they were to if we were to play the game that the big guys play, you have to buy 1.5 million bars, put them in a container that holds 35,000 uh 35 metric tons, and and then ship it, and then you can get the transportation cost down to two cents. So if you can't get the transportation cost down, then it becomes the price becomes too high to be able to sell in a store. So that's what we're working on is finding clever ways to get the product uh uh out there.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Well, let's do a little chocolate 101 here. I'm not sure I even understand the whole process. Tom, just kind of give us an overview. Basically, how is my chocolate produced?
SPEAKER_00The chocolate that you buy right now at Trader Joe's or wherever? Yeah. Okay, most of that chocolate is uh um they the farmers get together and they sell, they have usually a committee in the village who sells to the local middleman. And the middleman takes it to another middleman who then sells it to a buyer at the port. And then the buyer at the port talks to uh uh um a big chocolate company, and the big chocolate company says, uh we want this uh so so many percent of flat beans, moldy beans, uh slatey beans, purple beans, uh, and we want a certain size of bean. Uh and then they get them that specification, they should put it on a ship uh in a container uh and ship it to the destination. And that's that's how it's it's done. And they do what's called the cut test, where they put a hundred beans on a little flat plate, and they have a uh a laser sharp, uh razor sharp knife, and it slits the hundred beans all of a sudden, and then you count how many beans fit the uh what you want. So you want a majority of good quality beans. Um, and then some chocolates have lower are lower quality, so they have larger, more um purple beans that are bitter, and then you have to add a lot more milk powder and a lot more vanilla and a lot more sugar in order to counteract those the bitterness. Does all the chocolate come from Africa? About 80% of the world's chocolate comes from either West Africa or East Africa. It started at the intersection between Ecuador, Peru, that area in uh in the Amazon. So an Amazon plant. Um, it was brought to Africa in the early 19th century by the Portuguese on an island called Fernando Poe off of Nigeria, and then it moved from there to Ghana and then to Ivory Coast, and now throughout West Africa and East Africa.
SPEAKER_02All right. There's a lot to uncover here as we give you the bittersweet truth about chocolate microphone, Peggy. You were making the point earlier. Uh Tom was saying 80% of uh the chocolate comes from Africa, but the irony is uh Africans don't consume the product.
SPEAKER_03That's correct. It's a cash crop for them, and they're selling the beans, they're not selling the end result. So that's something that's different, is that they're making the chocolate that would be consumed right there in the village. So that's one of the markets that we're working to cultivate, is a local interest in that. In fact, um, we talk about our chocolate paneurs, and and one in one village creates little chocolates as gifts for weddings. So that's a brand new event. And Tom has some amazing videos of people for cocoa farmers, the first time they've tasted chocolate. It's just it's amazing.
SPEAKER_02They grow up but they don't taste it.
SPEAKER_03Exactly.
SPEAKER_02All right. So, Tom, what is we keep calling this the bittersweet truth about chocolate. What is the bittersweet truth about chocolate? What is it that you want consumers to understand?
SPEAKER_00Um that for twenty more than twenty years now, it's been common knowledge that most chocolate involves either child slavery or worse forms of um of um child labor, uh, which could mean using machetes, spraying trees with insecticides that c cause neurological damage. And children are used to do that because we pay so little for the beans that the farmers can't make enough money to uh hire somebody to do it. So they use their children to do the the hard work. Um and sometimes children are not paid. Um and there have been uh sp programs about children that were brought from Burkina Faso and Mali, north of Ivory Coast and Ghana, and um they spend five years working for no money at all. They're pay they're fed, they're clothed, uh the and their papers are removed from them. They work for five years, and then at the end of five years, they're promised a bicycle, and sometimes they get one and sometimes they don't. That's all they get for all that labor is a bicycle if they're lucky.
SPEAKER_02So, how does your organization change that?
SPEAKER_00What are you trying to do? The the result I believe originally people thought fair trade, that's the way to go, but it only brings it up one percent. So from four percent of retail dollar to five percent. That's not a big solution. Uh this is forty percent, much higher. And what it does when you they earn more money, they're more likely to have the money to um they don't want to use their children, they don't want to enslave children. It's they're almost forced by the market. And this we provide the wherewithal for them to hire somebody to do it. And if they join cooperatives, the cooperatives help them with that. Um so we support cooperatives, we've already started two cooperatives, we've funded two cooperatives uh in two villages. So um that way they um they don't have the incentive to uh to use child labor.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but uh before you comment though, you can't be too popular with your competitors. They must not like you coming in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's like uh and say you have an elephant and a mouse in a room and it's sort of dark. Um the elephant's standing ten feet high, and there's a mouse scurrying along the floorboard. It doesn't see the mouse. We're a mouse. They don't know we're nothing. We're nothing. So the b the big guys are so big and they don't want any kind of negative publicity. So it's better not to comment about stuff like this, and they say, oh, we're we're working with this. They actually employ people who specialize in manipulating your image. Um so uh they don't worry about stuff like that until it becomes obvious.
SPEAKER_03You were going to say, Peggy? I was just gonna add in that we um are focused on the livelihood. So that's the other problem with with child labor is then kids aren't going to school. Well, then you're perpetuating, you know, uh a lifestyle that's gonna be challenged, um, and then kids won't have higher potential for themselves. But when Tom first started to go to these villages, he was worried about what would make your lives better. And the first one was not let's teach us how to make chocolate, it was get us a rice hauling machine. We need labor-saving devices so that we can spend time developing our cocoa production and and doing other things. So instead of spending all day to go to the place to get the rice hauled, now it's right there in the village. So the women can go have it hauled right there. It takes 30 minutes instead of it taking all day. So the idea is that it's it's not just one single focus, it's looking at at the whole picture of what can help um livelihoods be better and and free up time so that the adults can spend the time learning these new skills and earning more money.
SPEAKER_02Tom's nodding his head.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was just thinking about some of the things. So Heggy mentioned rice hullers, that was really how I got started, was back in 2006, was uh uh to the actually twelve 2012 was when I asked two uh village chiefs if I were to because before then I was just going to villages and bringing tools and tr and just listening to stories. Um so I spent about six years doing research, and then in 2012 I asked them, so if I were to do something bigger than just bringing machetes and boots and uh shovels and things that make your lives easier, uh what would that be? What would be the bigger project? First they said, Oh, we need uh we need uh trucks. And I said, No, trucks are too expensive, I don't know anything about keeping them up. Uh I don't want to get into the truck business. What else? And they said, Well, the women they spend every day one hour pounding rice. What if what if you uh brought brought us uh built a rice holler uh facility right in our village? And so that's how we got started in 2013 with the first rice holler in Depa, and then 2016 the second rice huller in Pesoin. And then we've also uh done a number of wells because getting good water is a real problem. A lot of people are forced to drink uh drink water out of uh dips in the ground. Okay, so after it rains, you get some groundwater and you d and you drink that. It's all muddy. Um it's not c good water.
SPEAKER_02What parts of Africa are we talking about primarily, Tom?
SPEAKER_00Okay, I started I've worked in uh date in Ghana, uh Ivory Coast, and Cameroon, which are uh three totally different countries. Uh quite exciting to go into all three, but unfortunately we have to focus on one, and we're focusing on Cotiwa.
SPEAKER_02All right, so people are listening right now going, why geez, I didn't know this truth about chocolate. So as consumers, is there anything that they can do? Are there certain types of chocolate to avoid or certain brand names to search out, or does it matter at this stage?
SPEAKER_00I think in in all of fair trade is always a good bet. It's not as good as it could be.
SPEAKER_02Like the fair trade store we have downtown here.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr. Absolutely. They're really good people. Uh, they're selling good stuff, they're doing a lot of good work. I think fair trade is a really good system. We're just trying to go past that. We're trying to find a new level and and really help the farmers uh, you know, give them the tools that allow them to change their way of life. And the Ivorian government, by the way, has been very good at recognizing what the problem is and has been very supportive. And there's a number of people now in Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Cameroon who are making chocolate, trying to grow their way out of this situation. The problem is getting that chocolate to I the United States or or Europe, the transportation costs that we have to deal with. And if we can just get to the point where we have a large enough market, then we can solve the transportation problem. Um so it's like we're still too small and we need to get bigger in order to But you've made progress in all the time you've been doing this.
SPEAKER_02You felt like you've made a big difference.
SPEAKER_00Oh, we've made a huge difference. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Peggy, you agree?
SPEAKER_03Yes, and I was gonna say in this past year, we so we started with these two villages, one village co-op, the next one, and so now the next step is it to develop a training center. And so now we've opened up a training center so that other co-ops could come there to learn how to make the chocolate. So that was a a big deal this last summer that Tom and another board member went to get that going, get the machinery up and going, and develop all the training manuals and all the, you know, it's it's a huge endeavor to do that, but the idea is, as Tom said, to make more so that you have the volume that could be shipped more economically.
SPEAKER_02Is there a website to give out about your group?
SPEAKER_03ProjectHopeandFairness.
SPEAKER_00O R G.
SPEAKER_02All right. And uh Tom, give us a sense of the the consumer. Like, is the US are we a big consumer of chocolate?
SPEAKER_00We are big because there's three hundred and forty million people in this country, but in terms of a per capita basis, we're real small. Um the uh Europeans, especially the Swiss, are totally in love with chocolate and eat far more, probably close to four times as much as the average American.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell The Swiss eats eats more than we do per gallon.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. Well they have to, you know, they have to lubricate their vocal cords so they can uh they can cry from one mountaintop to another.
SPEAKER_03All the yodeli.
SPEAKER_00All the yodoling.
SPEAKER_02And is consumption of chocolate up worldwide?
SPEAKER_00It's it's up worldwide because China is a big consumer. Chinese are a lot richer than they used to be, and so they're driving uh the consumption of chocolate.
SPEAKER_02So even in China they consume chocolate.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes, and they're buying doing a lot of business with Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, so they don't have to go very far. They get a lot of it uh locally.
SPEAKER_02Wow. All right. Tom, you wanted to talk about Paris. What's the connection?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so in October, um I had the opportunity, I was invited to be part of a booth of the Coco Town Booth. This is a company that manufactures a lot of the small uh processing f machines that we buy. They're based in Atlanta, Georgia. Uh actually, and and and and the ground floor of this place is called Salon du Chocolat. It's the largest chocolate event in the world. Salon du Chocolat, it happens in Tokyo, Berlin, all over the world, and also on the west coast of the United States. Um but uh this one, this is the first one, and it's in Paris. Uh the ground floor is all bean to bar. Bean to bar is a new movement where Bean to Bar. Yeah. Um there's two factors, two parts of bean to bar, where small villages all over the world, uh individual um villages are uh are selling their beans as special, and they're people who are actually figuring out whom to buy beans from. And so instead of the big guys who are helping the big guys, it's little guys helping the little guys. And so it's a total revolution. And then the second part of that revolution is that now more and more um villagers are becoming uh realizing that they too can make chocolate and they can make actually very high quality chocolate that's very competitive with anything the big guys produce. So it's becoming a business just like in wine, where you have the big guys who are selling in the big supermarket volumes, but you also have a lot of little guys, and they're selling fresh, they're selling personality, uh, they're selling helping the villagers, so social, socioeconomic um s assistance as well. And so we're th this event, the Salon du Chocolat in Paris, I spent five days there. Um the ground floor was all bean to bar. And there's like 30 countries, and around each country's booth were all these little producers that were from that country, that were invited by the country to to come, and the country helped provide the funds so they could come to Paris and show off their chocolate. Um and um so I was part of that, and that's the ground floor, and uh that's about 40,000 square feet. Uh so there's maybe 80,000 people who come each day to the Salon du Chocolat. Eighty thousand. Yeah. It's very popular in Paris because it's only fifteen euros and it's lots of free samples. So lots of Parisians come there to eat chocolate. Everybody's walking around with big brown smirks on their face. And then the the second floor is all the big guys and all the traditional chocolate. So you you uh and then all the news media goes upstairs because they've got like chocolate dresses and everybody's hoping the chocolate melts. And then uh chocolate dresses. Chocolate dresses, yeah. And then all kinds of very clever pastry chefs doing all kinds of incredible f things with chocolate. But most of those people are buying from the big guys. But the ground floor, it's all the little guys making their small stuff with very special flavors.
SPEAKER_02Have you been to one of these?
SPEAKER_03I did. I was in Europe. He's not making this up. No, I went last year, and actually, even in the um, I think it was you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong. It was the Cote d'Or booth.
SPEAKER_00Booth, yeah.
SPEAKER_03A huge elephant made out of chocolate. It was uh unbelievable. Unbelievable. But it was and it was a different group of people that were downstairs than upstairs. It was really quite interesting um to to middle around. And and also Tom can correct me if I don't have this right, but I felt like Project Hope and Fairness is a real bean to bar, as many of the ones were in the bottom, in that it's being made in the village. Because there are many um chocolates that you can buy that say bean de bar, but the beans were bought in South America and then shipped to Italy, and they were made. The chocolate was actually made in Italy. So that means then going back to that cocoa farmer, they're not making maximum dollar um for their their uh their product. But um, anyways, I I like to think that we are an original, uh, a true bean to bar and that it's all done in the village.
SPEAKER_02Well, Peggy, a question I should have asked you earlier is that Tom's connection to this is well known by people over the years. What made you get involved?
SPEAKER_03Um, my I when I came to Cal Poly in 2006, and Tom was a colleague, and my research was in Africa and trying to improve nutritional status of individuals and help, especially the rural ones, have a harder time having good diet diversity and other types of things. And it's not, I I would say my experience is a lot of people kind of forget about Africa. We're so far away from Africa. And so, um, and I've even found that in my work there. They'd say, Oh, we hardly see any Americans who come here to live. And it's like, well, yeah, it's a long way away. It's further than Europe is, right? And so I think that's what first drew uh us together is our interest in that population and trying to find ways to improve livelihoods and sustainability so that people can have um good quality lives because they work so hard and are still so poor. And so that, anyways, that's I guess that a compelling part that brought us.
SPEAKER_02And I guess they do it, Tom, because there's no other real option for them to work, is there? It's not like they, oh, I'm gonna go work at Target.
SPEAKER_00Well, Africa I think of as uh that um co uh from the the colonial past until now, people think of it as a giant strip mine. It's just a source of of stuff for the rest of the world. And Africans don't want to be that way. They want to be manufacturing like everybody else. They want to be part of the world economy. They don't want to be at the what we call the bottom of the value chain. The value chain, you know, with just basic commodities at the bottom of the value chain, all the way up to the finished retail product at the top of the value chain. They want to come up at least to wholesale, if not be selling at the retail level. Then they stand to gain a hundred percent of the val of the retail dollar. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_02So map out the next ten years for us. Where do you see all this going?
SPEAKER_00Well, uh assuming that uh we're allowed to stay alive.
SPEAKER_02They look healthy to me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we never know. Uh I I don't make any assumptions. But uh I want to have like at least a dozen villages that are manufacturing. We have a training center in Induce to help cocoa farmers learn how to roast beans, ferment beans, manufacture chocolate. Um so it's to help them add value themselves rather than selling the beans to somebody else who adds the value for them. And then they end up buying the chocolate back rather than having made it themselves.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Another one would be that, well, we want in terms of markets, we want to expand uh the I guess consumption of chocolate. And interesting, Cote d'Ivoire also, as a government, wants to increase consumption of chocolate because they realize that they have a wonderful potential product that's there, and why not be able to sh you know improve everybody's livelihoods by improving that? And then also to find the ways to increase to global markets. So we always say that, oh, we want an airline to choose to have Project Open Fairness Village Chocolate as their little giveaways as part of meals, or so to to kind of create our own little um market that can increase the volume for the for these uh these co-ops.
SPEAKER_02We have a listener texting with a question wondering whether or not uh they can buy your chocolate online. Are there any online options for buying chocolate?
SPEAKER_00Uh at this point there are none. No.
SPEAKER_03They could.
SPEAKER_00They could. That's something we want to do.
SPEAKER_03Yes, we we definitely and we have been in the part of the ten-year plan. It is. Good point. Because we you have had a conversation with someone that's trying to build a marketplace for just like the the chocolate producing um villages, the same kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00Yes, as a matter of fact, there is someone who's uh working right now on having their own site that promotes African products. And I've already talked to her about um getting our product on that.
SPEAKER_02I think it would be a great idea. If I knew about that, I would order chocolate through that site to support your program and support the cocoa farmers.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and the other village-made chocolates, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Or are you looking for members? Or is this we're interested in talking to anyone who has feels like a child. So you never know who's got this. You never know who's never always looking for expertise.
SPEAKER_02All right, our thanks to Dr. Tom Newhouse, Dr. Peggy Papatakis. Uh Tom, final thoughts.
SPEAKER_00I this has been really the most important part of my life is chocolate. I can I never would have thought it. Um, but I've been in food all my life. Uh the chemistry of food, the the anthropology of food, the production of food. And for me, you know, chocolate, as uh Car Carol Islinea said, is the food of the gods.
SPEAKER_02It's got to be more interesting than sending mashed potatoes or something. I don't know. Brussels. I don't know. I do like my mashed potatoes.
SPEAKER_03And there are some good potatoes.
SPEAKER_02Peggy, final thoughts.
SPEAKER_03Um please come to our uh our event to um help help support Project Hope and Fairness and going to the website. Also, we we are happy to spread the word and educate others on what's going on in the chocolate business. And um and we want to improve the livelihoods of these farmers.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for coming in. Thanks for sharing the conversation, and thanks for the chocolate. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03Most welcome.