Companiesandme

Great chocolate begins with great cacao beans. And great beans begin on the farm, with the farmers. TCHOSource is a program we developed to invest in the farmers who grow our cacao.  

It's built on the most powerful motivator for development, mutual self-interest: growers need to raise their incomes; and our need to secure long-term sources of great cacao so we can make the best chocolate.

What a difference a year makes. A year ago, John Kehoe, our Director of Cacao Sourcing and Farmer Relations, along with Timothy Childs, our co-founder/Chief Chocolate Officer Emeritus, traveled to Peru to launch our first pilot TCHOSource project. They and our cacao partners down there installed a Flavor Lab (the same equipment we use in San Francisco to formulate our chocolate) at the co-op’s headquarters as well as some solar-powered data sensory arrays to monitor fermentation. 

After training the co-op’s technicians in sensory analysis and best practices in fermentation, then demonstrating in the Flavor Lab what flavor profiles we desired, farmers who might not have even tasted chocolate before learned how to improve their cacao. Before the Flavor Lab install, the co-op’s cocoa beans were unremarkable—but our skilled "bean team" saw promise in them, if improvements could be made in the way the beans were fermented and dried.

Several months later, during the harvest, we received cocoa bean samples that were simply amazing in flavor!  And the growers continued to refine their methods throughout the harvest (optimizing the fermentation/drying cycles to produce the flavor profiles we sought). Just two months ago, we received notice that our co-op partner had become a finalist in a nationwide cacao quality competition (among the top three in the whole country for quality). Only a year earlier, the same co-op didn’t even make it to the first round of the contest, due to poor fermentation. While the co-op's Cocoa Program Manager credits the joint efforts of TCHOSource for their success, we simply gave them the tools and training so that they could succeed on their own.

The Peruvian National Cocoa Contest (Concurso Nacional de Cacao Peruano) is a big deal. The press conference held to promote the 3rd annual contest featured not only the Peruvian Minister of Agriculture, but all sorts of VIPs including Peruvian Prime Minister Yehude Simon and US Ambassador Michael Kinsley. The judges of the contest include some of the best chocolate palates in Peru, the U.S., and Europe.

Of course, at the root of all our excitement is knowing that the TCHO Flavor Lab serves the co-op’s farmers, giving them data about the physical and sensory characteristics of their cocoa in feedback loops that are fast enough to make a difference in the quality of their crops. It’s not just the Ministry of Agriculture and the Embassy who pay attention to the National Cocoa Contest—cocoa buyers from all over the world are watching the winners. Better cocoa quality brings better prices, and higher incomes to the farming households that need it most.  "El Buen Chocolate Nace del Campo," (Good chocolate is born from the farm) was the theme of this year’s contest.

We recently installed our third Flavor Lab, most recently in Peru. As we continue to grow (among other recent exciting news, you'll now find our products at Starbucks), the impact of our efforts will continue to grow in parallel.