I've found frozen Cacao and Cupuacu(T. Grandiflorum) juices at Brazilian groceries in California and Hawaii, and I'm sure from there you could find a distributor. Or, if your Portuguese is decent, try this site:
Count me in for a couple of litres 
~
Some fiends here do fresh sugar cane juice and sell it at markets and in various shops. Boy do they have problems with it fermenting. I left a half bottle of it on top of my home refrigerator one day and by the time I came back from shopping it had exploded literally covering the kitchen.
What they do for shops is hard freeze asap after juicing and deliver frozen to shops refrigerators (which is quite common for many products here). Even then their longevity measures in days and they monitor shops fridges replacing fermenting bottles. They don't pasteurize as it spoils the taste in their opionion. Guess there must be some volatiles that are lost at 72 degrees C.
Oh I see now you are in Equador... must be some local farms there you can find who can treat this nectar the right way and pasturize or freeze...when you find, let me know... amazing stuff...we can drink it and will live forever
This is a great idea. When I was in Hawaii, we drank some Cacao nectar that Sharkey had made from his harvesting. WOW, what a great juice, incredible I must say. I had the same idea. There is certainly a market for this stuff. The issue will be capturing this pulp or juice before too much fermentation, as in fact it is actually fermenting off the seeds and making itself into juice. The process of capturing this juice or pulp, and pasturizing or freezing it to keep it safe for consumption of further processing is the biggest problem. We buy fruit puree from a fruit coop in France. The fresh fruit is delivered daily to the coop for processing. If it is not able to process, they place the fruit in a huge warehouse air tight room, suck the oxygen out of the room and drop the temp to around 1 dec C, suspending the fermentation process until they can properly extact and process. I dont see any cacao growing regions having even an Igloo cooler let alone a setup like this, so other than nectar made on the spot on the farm, and consumed almost immediately, this is going to be a tough one to find. BUT PLEASE I WISH SOMEONE COULD DO IT, as it is great stuff going to waste.
I do know there is a chocolatier or baker in Hawaii that is making Cacao Nectar ganache, although I have not tasted, I bet it is great.
Our best bet would be to find some farmers in Hawaii willing to setup a small process treatment plant, and get it from there.
I can only imagine this nectar would be the most exotic juice in the world if made by someone.
When I was in Aftrica, the locals distilled it into home made moonshine cocktail.....not bad after a hard day of harvesting.
dear Sirs,
I need to buy immediatly frozen cacau pulp frozen to do rich juices in USA.
Can you help me ot find it?
lartecsa@gmail.com
Thanks for the response. I am really too small and unknown to get rated usually, although here and there I have, as for ex someone was rating Israeli chocolate- a chocophile, and she was neutral to begin with so I agreed. The rating was very good.
But really the discussion was not about my business.
I guess it does depend on who and what kind of review-you are correct.
I get annoyed when newspapers here, online and not, do exactly what you wrote-some Italian or French chocolatier who has the business of his great great grandfather etc, rates chocolatiers here along with other un named local judges. How can one know if PR people didn't pay for the article for some business? And then the local food or chocolate forums discuss the results and sometimes are a bit nasty. Fine to be neutral, fine to praise, but why get nasty and try to hurt someone's business? Not that I have any connection to such a business, but the issue just annoys me as I would never deliberately try to hurt someone's income and livelihoodand I thought to see what other people think. SOmetimes the responses to this topic on other forums are almost mean (not here).
Ilana;
Youaddress a very interesting topic - one that I have debated with people for a long time. Unfortunately there are many food blogs (urbanspoon.com, chowhound.com etc) which allow people to post freely. Add to that the exposure via twitter and other social media vehicles, and we as business people really don't have any control over what gets posted about our businesses over the Internet - good, bad, or ugly.
Prior to getting into chocolate, I was an internet expert who even went so far as to takeone of mycompanies public on the NASD . I'm very aware of the damage that negative internet publicity for a business can create. Google "Choklat", and you will find a miriad of posts on us - some being terribly negative - calling us arrogant, over priced, etc, right through to "Oh my God! I've just found Heaven on Earth!".
As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, people read the reviews, and many take them with a grain of salt. In fact, I've even had people come in specificially because we've been attacked in a blog post. (I chewed out a snotty customer, and she posted my reply. A few people read it and came in just to spite her! Haha!).
One thing I DON'T subscribe to, is contests, where a few high visibility, well respected community members judge a business's products, and then rate them. A lot of business is conducted on a trusted referral, and to have a trusted member of the community criticize a business for whatever reason, and have that criticism made public, that WILL have a damaging effect on the business. The bottom line for me, is I don't care about contests, or competitions where my chocolate is "judged" by a select few. God only knows what THEIR agenda's are!!! I care about what my customers think. After all, some hoity toity french chef with a name I've never heard, nor can pronounce, who's studied under another hoity toity chocolatier with a name I can't pronounce in a Belgian town I've never heard of, will never buy enough chocolate to keep my doors open. However the thousands of customers who already DO buy our chocolate will. My customers are more important than Mr. Hoity Toity.
Cheers.
Brad
For those interested, I ended up emailing Keller directly and they have a tray for their truffle shells and they are shipping to Qzina for me.
I wrote the above post before having tried filling the shells, but I just did so and I know why a filling tray would be used! It is not easy to fill a truffle completely without an air pocket. The tray would presumably allow you to force filling into the shell with the weight of the tray holding the shell in place, allowing you to fill it without air and to clean excess filling from the top of the tray rather than the sides of the truffle shell. I am sure that with practice it is doable, but after this experience I would definitely like to find a filling tray that matches the Keller brand.
I spoke with Tamara who said she was going to refer me to a company in Montreal (she was headed into a meeting), which I'm guessing was Chocolat Chocolat. I contacted them and they don't sell them, but it raises another question regarding the advantage of using them. BTW, Albert Uster sells metal trays for their truffle shells (looks like at least $400 for filling and sealing trays, excluding shipping) and Pastry Chef has a plastic one ($60) for their truffles (Dobla brand), which are a different brand than that sold by Qzina, which has an office in Vancouver where I live.
The only other reference on the net that I found was a comment by someone who suggested that the trays were difficult to use. However, the book I have says they are major time savers. So other than locating trays that match the Keller brand, I was curious to know whether people who make truffles with premade hollow shells use trays or why they don't use them.
Jim;
The person at Qzina I would start with is Tamara Fusick. Great service. Her contact information is below:
Tamara Fusick
Gourmet Account Manager
Calgary & Southern Alberta
Qzina Specialty Foods, Inc
CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF INSPIRATION
FOR CHOCOLATE, DESSERT AND PASTRY PROFESSIONALS.
12547-129th st.
Edmonton, Alberta
Cell: 403-585-3488
Toll Free: 800-563-4315
Telephone: 780-447-4499
Fax: 780-447-2499
Jim -
Richard Foley mentioned that Qzina was selling the Keller shells. I would start there. Qzina also has operations in Canada if I recall correctly.
Does anyone know who sells filling and sealing trays that match the Keller made truffles? I've read that there is variation in truffle hole openings and trays have to be matched to truffle shells.
Hi - I've purchased the 32 impression round truffle molds from JB Prince. They are about $50 each. It's a 2-piece magnetic mold. You fill the bottom sphere up, place the top part on (a half-sphere w/hole), and if you are doing it old school, hit the table a few times on each side of the mold to make sure it covers the whole thing, (but I would suggest the vibrating table), then place it upside down on a cooling rack so the extra chocolate drips out of the hole. Put parchment paper underneath to capture the extra chocolate to use again. With 10 molds I can make about 320 molds at a time. The investment is about $500.
The thing is this - I'm tired! And it is an investment of time. I have to use the same molds for my white, milk and dark chocolate, so it's kind of a 1-2 day investment if you need them ASAP.
I spoke with my chocolate distributor and he said he can get them pre-made for me from Callebaut, but he thinks they are made with "covering" chocolate, which I do not want to use. I'm waiting to hear back to confirm.
So my question is - would anyone know of a company that sells the pre-made shells made out of pure, good old fashioned, cocoa butter only, couverture chocolate?
Thanks!
Patty Medina
medinachocolatier.com
ok, first of all: yes, fill the truffle shells almost to the top and let them rest over night before cap them.
by the next day they should have shrunk enough to leave enough space to close them.
Pre-made truffle shells are very expensive.
Now, here is a way to make truffles (shells) as cheap as it can be, without having to buy a spinner.
Chocolate World in Belgium are selling a filling machine called "Easy Fill" which I have used for many years.
Not cheap, but a far cry away from a one shot machine/spinner.
And now the trick:
they are selling a 2pc truffle mould (magnet/series 2000) which you can use to make either only truffle shells or in "2 shot" way, the entire truffle with filling.
I have the moulds, but still have to find the time to use them.
You can of course also fill the moulds by hand but the easy fill machine will make it much faster and more equal in weight.
Make sure to get the machine for truffles as there are 2 types.
Check-out their website.
Thanks for the advice, everyone. It's hard for me to go from completely hand made EVERYTHING to using shells, but my research has shown they are extremely common. I even ordered some truffles from a French guy in the states, and he was using them. So I figure, if it's good enough for a French guy, it's good enough for me! 
My next question is: what's the best way to fill/cap the shells? When I was making molded chocolates (where I made the shells myself) I would let the fillings set overnight before capping. Is this recommended for truffles too? I've read that people cap them right after filling, but my concern would be that the filling would contract as it sets, leaving a gap for air, which could result in mold.
For anyone interested in learning a tiny bit more about one-shot, try this page on the A w ema web site.
CL,
Premade truffle shells are the way to go, as you need to make extremely high volumes to justify doing it yourself.
And with truffles, the sweet, creamy center is what counts the most!
Good luck,
John R.
Since your main concern is consistency in size, I'd suggest you buy a guitar. Different arms will produce different size squares, and from that point you only need to roll them into truffles. The end result will be size uniformity, you'll save yourself the cost of having to always purchase premade shells, and then in good conscience you can continue to say your truffles are handmade.
Have you ever walked into a chocolate shop and seen perfectly round (except for a flat bottom) truffles? They were done either using a one-shot machine or by filling shells.
You identified the key issue for you - if there was any negative impact on taste or texture you would not use them. As there is not, then why not? A long time ago I learned that it was important to understand what I was "willing to fall on my sword" for when it came to production. Yeah, I know I could make my own puff pastry, but, there are so many good ones that are frozen, by using those I could concentrate on what really set my work apart and allowed me to increase production (or reduce the number of hours I spent in the kitchen).
One of the most famous chocolate companies in Chicago (whose name also starts with a V and is not Valrhona though the name is French) used shells from the very beginning - although they may be doing them on one-shot machines now for production and shelf-life reasons.
The only problem that I see is representing them as one thing (100% hand-made) if they are not.
BTW - just because you start using shells doesn't mean there is no longer room for a 100% hand-made product - a real truffe nature au chocolat.
Hi,
Have you thought about Chocoflex by Laghi, from Pavoni.it? Is an alternative to the already made shells, it gives you consistency in weight and shape.
I have used the shells for long time, nothing wrong or bad about that.
but if you wish to do everything from scratch, you could either trying piping, let dry and then hand roll (you could easily pipe about 200/300 every 15 min.) but you may have problem with size consistency. I decided to switch to Pavoflex mainly because the cost of shells is too high where i live.
regards
Nino
Truffle shells are standard in the industry and are designed thin so you dont really notice them, and they should not be impacting flavor, but more used as a tool for your production. Although I would not suggest using bad chocolate truffle shells, I think spending the money on expensive truffle shells is not worth it, again as you likely will not taste the impact of the truffle shell in the finished product.
Qzina sells a truffle shell made in Germany, with Callebaut Chocolate, made by Keller. We stock these in Chicago, well priced, that should increase your profit vs more expensive truffle shells. Keller is probably the biggest producer in the world of truffle shells, top quality. They also have a number of shells in unique shapes by special order. We import direct from Keller in full containers and are very competitively priced.
Also Truffle shells allow you to manufacture very soft fillings, which is not possible without them. We also can get you liquor shells, smaller hole in the top, designed for liquid filling. There are also filling machines, and plates available for truffle shell trays that dramatically speed up your production, and make covering or topping the shells easy, consistent, and fast.
IF your production gets very high in volume, you should then consider the only machine that can truly deposit thin shell one shot, truffle shell and filling in one shot, the Avema Depositor. We have many customers who for example, have the round truffle shell molds, and fill the chocolate and filling into the round ball shape, in one shot, still maintaining a thin shell and liquid filling. That machine however is around 100K. But just for future reference.
Hello friends,
I own a small chocolate company which has been slowly growing over the last 4 years. I mainly sell wholesale to small gourmet shops, and am really looking to expand out of my city and to a more national basis. With that in mind, I really need for this business to become profitable. My sales doubled in 2010 and I did see a profit (for the first time) but I have yet to pay myself (or any employees). In other words, I need to start making money.
My biggest selling item are my truffles- they make up about 25% of my total sales. I have been doing everything by hand- making the ganache (though I have started using a food processor to help with this), scooping (#100 ice cream type scoop), rolling, dipping, everything. I can personally scoop, roll & dip about 200 truffles/hour. However, I have problems with consistency of size, as well as shelf life (I typically get a very thing shell). I am considering using premade shells, but I have always been opposed to them in the past. They seem like a copout to me, a shortcut, etc.
I got some samples from my local distributor (who does sell the Valrhona shells, though these were not V's) and tried it with one ganache, and I don't really notice a difference. Obviously if the shells made a difference in taste or texture, I wouldn't consider them.
So my question is, does using premade shells make me a bad person? I've never been one to take the easy way out just to make a buck, but to be honest, if I don't start making money soon, I won't be making chocolates at all for much longer!
My advice is to purchase a true and tested winnower, you will save money vs testing and trial and error.
I just visited Cacao Cucina in Tampa, great winnower for 11,000 USD so for 8000 Euro, you have never to worry about it...
But on the other hand, I visited a farm in Hawaii winnowing with a small vibrating table, and a modified Shop Vacuum from the hardware store.
Nice thing about buying from Cacao Cucina is the machine breaks, winnows, and results are very good, very low shell content.
Hello !
Firstly, thank you for this site and for this forum ! It's so useful for us!
We are new to making chocolates and we would like to create our factory for handcrafted chocolate in a small european country.
We learned from internet, that tomake1 kgofchocolate, about300-600beans ( 500-700gr) are processed. Is this true ?
We would like to build our winnower. Do you have some advices ?
Thank you in advance for your help !
On the same topic you may also want to check this short but well written opinion piece :
[Edited to add: The study, "which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.
Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers.]
Is being "smug" a part of the challenge that needs to be overcome?
Earlier today, Equal Exchange posted the following table on their Facebook page:
and then bragged about the fact that their pay ratio (the ratio between the highest-paid and lowest-paid workers in the company) was only 4:1.
I asked them if their computation of the pay ratio included what growers got paid.
They poasted no, but then tried to justify their position in a very long reply by saying that, when they included an estimated annual income for an average grower at US$3000 that their pay ratio was still "only" 33:1 - a much more "egalitarian" figure than companies whose CEOs would have pay ratios of thousands:1 or more if the wages of foreign farmers were considered in the mix.
Is "egalitarian" "fair?" Is that the measure of the success of these programs?
For me, trumpeting the pay ratio is a symptom of an attitude that is prevalent in programs like FLO, and reminds me of a shell game where our attention is deliberately distracted so we can't see what's actually going on.
Dear Mark,
Thanks for the observations, and you are right, applying P & K is not the most environmental sustainable solution (although the N is normally causing the most harm in terms of soil acidification and related N2o emissions. The basic issue is that crop removal (cocoa beans to be consumed in the West) equals nutrient removal. In a closed system (amazon rainforest) cocoa pulp is eaten by animals and the beans end up on the soil to regenerate. When humans start to harvest and remove the beans the nutrients should be replenished to be able to produce cocoa on the long run. The other option could be to accept relative low yields (250 kg), but more hectares are needed to grow cocoa (world demand is growing with 2% per year).
These extra hectares needed are just the remaining forest patches with high biodiversity value (and enormous carbon content in the biomass and soil!). So that's basically why a better management of what already has been cut down would make sense, first by applying all nutrient recylcing measures, and supply the missing nutrients in sufficient cuantities to maintain a healthy balance. The Soil Organic Matter content should be maximized and soil life be supported as much as possible, but where nutrient reservoirs are low, some sort of replenishment should take place (organic or in-organic). The basic reason is that low yields will push farmers in the end towards the remaining forest borders in order to start cocoa farming in these buffer zones (high prices have the same effect!).
I think you are right with your suggestion to maintain a 30% in tact, but farm preparation has been (sometimes) done by timber companies. As free service they offer to remove the trees so farmers can plant cocoa. As extra service they also take away the trees, so the farmers don't need to worry about them anymore. That is the reality of the world we live in.
Perhaps we should consume less chocolate, or chocolate made from beans that can only grow combined with other trees (like the criollo's)?
In terms of envirmental impact the fine flavour beans are much much better that the full sun cocoas! But we should be prepared to pay a decent price for these cocoa beans (at least to compensate for the lower yields).
The current limited premium for fine flavour actually is perhaps not and incentive for farmers to grow more fine flavour beans.
Best regards
Rodney
I've been following this discussion with great interest. As a chocolate educator I try to involve people in the complex issues surrounding cacao and chocolate, including the "fair-trade" and ecological issues.
Rodney, You've brought up a really good point of issue concerning the ecological sustainability of growing cacao. Most, if not all tropical ecologists/agronomists, and especially those working with commodities "cash" crops, have always spoken about the viability of growing these crops in the long term. How does one maintain the fertility of the soils given rainforest ecology while also sustaining whole ecosystems along with balancing the needs of both human living systems and providing a living? What do you do to increase these while being sustainable in the short and long term?
By cutting the rainforest down just to grow cash crops will, maybe, in the short term provide an income for those on the ground, but as you stated, the system will become exhausted and more rainforest gets cut down. Once those soils have lost their fertility it does not come back. It takes a long time for the rainforest to grow back - if it does. Given the variables of the climate and the expansion of desertification this may not happen at all.
I would suggest that investment needs to include the overall perspective of where in the world these 'cash' crops are being grown, i.e. the rainforest. The simple answer is to apply (N)-P-K. But that stuff is expensive - surely the growers can't afford it, nor can the governments of the respective countries. And I don't think NGO's or the other advocates of 'fair-trade' will pay for it either. And if you add the cost of shipping these into the equation... well.. you get my drift.
Also, just adding n-p-k is really not enough to support the viability of soil microorganisms. There are a lot of macro and micro nutrients that are made available through the actions of microorganisms that are needed for a healthy ecosystem - especially in agriculture crops. There is already enough evidence here in the Western world that the practice (of just adding n-p-k) has a couple detrimental costs and effects upon the environment - those petrochemical fertilizers consume a lot of energy in producing them, they have been shown to decrease the soil microorganisms and they leach out of the system in large quantities and pollute water sources and the larger environment, in essence poisoning the ecosystem and human drinking water.
I believe that in order to increase the sustainability and address all these needs, one needs to look at not cutting down the rainforest wholesale but leaving about 30%, with most being over-story. Intermixing other cash crops (food sources, lumber, etc...) into the growth pattern will provide for several things - more varied income for the growers, stabilizing the ecosystem in general which introduces a better habitat for wildlife, increasing the ground soil viability by introducing organic material through natural processes along with adding small amounts of both organic matter and fertilizers.
This will obviously impact cacao growing patterns,usually by lessening the amounts of cocoa beans coming out of the regions (not the point I understand for us chocolate loving westerners).
However, though cacao originated in the understory of the rainforest, which is a better habitat for it, growing in full sun or 1% shade is detrimental to the plant in the long term. In the full rainforest there were historically less incidents of disease attacking cacao - simply because the tress were too widely spaced for disease to wipe out whole stands. I am not suggesting this as an alternative to the current agricultural growing systems in place now as it does not address the issues and needs of all concerned.
By increasing to 30% and adding these other things growers could actually expand their holdings and increase the cacao groves, in essence creating managed growing environments while sustaining the viability of the whole ecosystem.
There is evidence that in pre-Columbian times humans in the Americas created managed agricultural environments over large tracts of land, which sustained peoples for long periods of time. I'm not really suggesting anything new here. This is just like modern "permaculture'.
I think I remember the that there are a few models of this happening on a smaller scale, in South America and in the DRC.
I also appreciate your brining into the discussion the political issues, i.e. the instituted SAPs, IMF/Word Bank, instability of governments... etc...
Kristy, thank you for your speaking about your experiences on the ground and your frank honesty. It is very nice for me to hear from professionals who study these issues in depth. Thanks for your link - will read it.
These really are large and complicated issues. I think that most of the large agricultural/commodity/chocolate companies just have their heads in the sand and do not want to address these larger issues (although to be fair, some are trying) - even though combined they could make a big difference, imo. Governments are not going to, neither is the answer in the large political organizations (again some are trying, but with little funding).
We do live on One world, we just can't seem to get outside our little minds/heads/egos/greed to be able to see the bigger picture and work together. On a small scale quite a lot of us 'see' and are doing this, but...
kwim?
Looking forward to learning more on this discussion - I like the intelligent and thoughtfulness put forward by everyone and thanks for the links.
Hi Kristy,
Thanks for your feedback! Cocoa farmers in Ghana have yields from 280 kg/Ha (eastern region) upto more than 1 MT in the Western regions (recently converted forest lands). The difference is mainly caused by the availabilty of soil nutrients (cocoa requires P & K mainly) and pest and disease control (25% is lost due to pest and diseases). The relative poor soils in West Africa needs some sort of replenishment, otherwise after 15 years you'll end up with an exhausted system.
Moderate yields of 800 kg/Ha would for the average farmer result in a doubling of their income. An expansion from 1.8 to 3.6 Hectare combined with a bettter yield would have an serious impact!
Many of these issues cannot be solved from a supply chain perspective, but actually have to do with how you build a healthy commodity sector. After de de-colonisation in Africa ('60-'70) and structural adjustment programs from World Bank and IMF, followed by a collapse of international trade agreements that resulted in a oversupply and low commodity prices we end up with so called orphan commodities like cocoa, meaning little investment in farmer training, research, extenson services, availability of planting material, fertilizer availability, timely finance (for harvest, but also plantation renovation).
Within that context still the Ghanian cocoa farmer is pretty well served, compared to many other cocoa farmers!
Don't want to make the issue more complex, but this in my opinion is the situation the cocoa sector needs to deal with. In the end, we as consumers have had 50 years of declining chocolate prices (Lidl sells chocolate at Euro 0,35/100 gram), and it is time to really invest in order to make cocoa farming a decent business.
All the best
Rodney Nikkels
Rodney, your comment about the farmer perspective -- on small farm size and low yields -- really brought me back to what was one of the more powerful moments of my fieldwork in Ghana. I had been working with farmers who sold to Kuapa Kokoo, the fair-trade cooperative, and with farmers who sold to Akuafo Adamfo, a licensed buying company that did not have FLO certification, but that was nevertheless doing plenty of social development work.
I was talking one day with a farmer who sold to Akuafo Adamfo, her name is Mercy, and when I mentioned fair trade to her, she had never heard of such a thing before and asked me to explain (this was common among farmers in Ghana - hardly any of them knew what fair trade was). I told her that consumers in the US and Europe pay a little more for a chocolate bar, so that farmers in Ghana could earn a little more for their cocoa beans.
Mercy looked at me as if I had six heads. I'll paraphrase her response: "Why would I want to earn a little more for my cocoa?" she said. "If I want to make more money, I must work harder to grow more cocoa."
Her response stopped me in my tracks. I had always thought first about price -- raising cocoa's price was paramount for me (and in many ways, still is). I had never thought before that simply growing more cocoa was a solution.
But I think you have hit the nail on the head with the low yields/small farm size issue, Rodney. I forget sometimes, thinking and writing about fair trade, that what appears most important to me, a white Western woman who has the privilege to sit around and think philosophically about trade issues, does not necessarily resonate with cocoa farmers. At the heart of Mercy's material poverty was the fact that she grew a tiny amount of cocoa, which she sold for a tiny price. The small addition of a few more cedis from an unknown entity called "Fairtrade" meant nothing to her. What was of much greater interest to Mercy, as well as most of the farmers I worked with in Ghana, was the national spraying program, in which the government supplied pesticides and spraying machines. This did increase yields, sometimes significantly.
We in the West never, ever sit around and think, "If only we could spray more pesticides on the cocoa trees, farmers' lives would be so much better!" But living as she did on the margins, Mercy did think that, along with plenty of other farmers. I realize that this is hardly a solution and I am not advocating that we all champion pesticide application now. This post probably raises more questions than answers. But I did want to share what was, for me, an enlightening moment, when I first realized that what *I* believed to be fair was not what a farmer believed to be fair -- that realization started me down a long road of critical thinking, the end of which I am nowhere near as yet.
Well, we live since a couple of years in a period of relative better cocoa world market prices and people seem to forget that in the period 1994-1999 and 2002-2007 commodity prices were (very) low. FT system guaranteed a minimum price for the cocoa beans and made it feasible for farmers and coops to survive. Origins like Peru where fine quality cocoa beans are exported by producers coops have benefited from this (Naranjillo, Acopagro, Cepicafe) and I must say that without the price protection from FT it would have been much more difficult. The basic problem is the demand side combined with a too low premium in times of cocoa world market prices above the fair trade minimum price. Fair Trade is not the solution for all issues, but a guaranteed minimum price for a tree crop is a helpfull tool to maintain your farm and not uproot and shift to annual crops.
The yearly cost of $ 2500 for FT certification (my estimation for a producer organisation) is in my opinion not the issue to be honest (for exports you would normally need at least 1 container, being 18 MT of cocoa beans, with a FOB value of $ 54.000)
From a farmer perspective, the small size of the farms combined with low yields is much more an issue. If you have a 1 hectare farm with a yield of 500 kg of beans, it is impossible to earn a decent income. In addition, for fine flavour beans, the relative small mark-up for precious beans is a crucial bottleneck, espcially considering the lower yields of the criollo cocoa (nacional at 350 kg/Ha in Esmeraldas, Ecuador compared with a 1,2 MT when using CCN51).
Best regards
Rodney Nikkels
Clay, I could not agree more. Certification fees are a real issue for cooperatives, as is the gargantuan reporting responsibility they must undertake to prove they meet FLO producer standards. I do not see how either one is germane to fairness -- especially in a system (ethical trade in general) that was instituted to redress ECONOMIC imbalances between producers and the people who manufacture and consume their products.
I have spent time thinking this issue through in a different way, asking how distinct Fairtrade really is from the predominant economic and ideological system of neoliberalism. Too often Fairtrade is presented as a separate and alternative system, when in fact (as the numbers I offered above show), it can be indistinguishable from the world market. I just made the full article excerpted above available on my blog , and here is the direct link to the article for anyone who is interested in these issues. Though I deal with FLO in general, my case study is the cocoa-chocolate trade, particularly in Ghana and Britain.
Kristy:
The moral mafia I am referring to is not FLO, it's supporters of "Fair" trade who have not actually spent any time to learn what is really going on.
It's the general consuming public that assumes that "Fair" trade MUST BE FAIR just because there is a certificate and who demands that products/ingredients must be FT & Organic without really understanding what that means. Like many minorities, they can be very vocal and tend to be passionate, so they garner a lot of attention and can exert outsize influence.
Chocolate Life Nat Bletter posted a link to a very interesting thesis on FT coffee in Laos that clearly reveals some of the potential (and real) flaws in certificate programs as well as some of the unintended consequences of such programs. ChocolateLife member Cristian Melo has posted a link to a fabulous thesis he did on cocoa in Ecuador.
Your numbers above clearly show that the direct economic benefits are hard to justify. My contention has always been that if FT was so great why aren't there many, many, many more co-ops who are FT certified? Could it be that the value - delivered to the grower - is not as rosy as the picture painted to the consumer? Could it be that it's so expensive that a significant percentage of certification fees is paid by third parties (including NGOs and taxpayer-funded aid programs)? Perhaps more importantly, the finances of these certification organizations is far from transparent. Given their demand for traceability up the supply chain you'd think that delivering reliable numbers for quantities of product moved and the value of the social premium paid would be easy to publish (and would be something they would be proud to publish). Yet, getting such figures is NOT an easy task. I have been waiting since May for "reliable" numbers from FLO's press office and have been politely stonewalled every time I have asked.
I think that FT (as practiced by FLO, RA, and others) is a part of an answer, but not the answer. Critical examination of the value these programs actually deliver - relative to the value reaped by the program itself and upstream actors in the supply chain - needs much closer examination. At the moment, it costs a company like Kraft almost nothing to gain FT certification. However, they can charge a premium for FT certified product (the market will pay for the perceived social benefit), so in the end, Kraft makes millions more than the producers do.
Is that "fair?"
I often teach and write about fair trade (my doctoral work was on the cocoa-chocolate trade, part of it on the FLO system), and I find that I run increasingly thin on ways to justify Fairtrade to my university students, or anyone who sincerely desires a way to direct their purchasing power ethically.
I am intrigued by Clay's use of the term "moral mafia" to describe the FLO system -- the suggestion being that to be considered "fair," producer co-ops are beholden to this particular model. Of course they are not -- there are plenty of artisan makers trying to circumvent it -- but the fair trade model remains by far the most visible to consumers, even if they don't fully understand how it works. So in that way, yes, it does have a stranglehold.
I did some research this summer for an article on FLO, and below are the figures I came up with. Note that I quote ONLY the FLO price floor for cocoa, which was $1600 per metric ton until January 2011. The more common protocol is to combine the social premium of $150 (now $200) with the price floor, which in my opinion artificially inflates the reported price for cocoa beans ; the social premium almost never reaches farmers as cash for their crop, and goes almost exclusively to development projects, which is NOT a direct form of compensation. Here is my analysis:
For most of its existence, FLO has set the Fairtrade Minimum Price for conventional (non-organic, bulk) cocoa at $1600 per metric ton; in January 2011, it raised the price floor by 25%, to $2000. Taking into account this recent increase, between January 2006 and May 2011, the Fairtrade Minimum Price was higher than the world market price during eight months, at an average of $38.50 per metric ton. For fifty-seven months, the FLO price floor was lower, by an average of $987.51. That is, for all but eight months of the last five and a half years, certified cooperatives have received the world market price for their cocoa. To compare the two pricing schemes in a different way, FLO raised its price floor for cocoa to $2000 per metric ton in January 2011. For the twelve months preceding this raise, the average world market price for cocoa was $3,132.99.
The Fairtrade Minimum Price for cocoa seems to run much more in parallel with, rather than as alternative to, the price set on the world market. In the absence of derivation specifics (which are not given in either the Fairtrade Standards for Cocoa, which detail the commodity-specific price floor and premium, nor the global Minimum Price and Premium Table), the Fairtrade Minimum Price seems to be a sort of average of world market prices, moving irregularly upwards as market prices also rise. Of course, because agricultural commodities are subject to large price fluctuations, from year to year or even over the course of a single growing season, by guaranteeing a minimum price over the long term, Fairtrade does introduce a degree of security into a volatile system, smoothing budgetary forecasts and guaranteeing a certain amount of revenue. If the market price should fall below $2000 in the coming months, Fairtrade certification would protect participating cooperatives. Yet in practice, the Fairtrade Minimum Price has not, at least in recent years, demonstrated a meaningful alternative to the trade terms set on the world market.
Note: I calculated world market prices using the ICCO Monthly Averages of Daily Prices, available on the ICCO website, http://www.icco.org/statistics/monthly.aspx
Nat, many thanks for posting this, I devoured it, it's a very nice piece of academic research, I'll be in touch with Vanh.
