Our company was born 8 years ago in Tolima, Colombia, with the purpose to become the best in the world helping small farmers in Colombia to leave extreme poverty behind and positively change their quality of life.
Throughout the first years this evolved into what we called the Responsible Chocolate® movement and consist of 5 actions that help the farmer who begins working with us from day 1.
The first action immediately helps the farmer financially and motivates her/him to trade directly with us. We eliminate middlemen and acquire the logistic and post-harvest costs off farmers. In a country like Colombia, where rural areas are hours away through unpaved roads, accessibility is a big issue and a big costs affecting the farmers.
This makes us the only company in the UK making chocolate from the fruit and picking it up in each of our farmers' farms.
The idea was originally to pay the farmers more and build a closer relationships but with time we checked that paying them more did not necessarily improved the quality of life. How can a 56 year old farmer have quality of life when he is carrying buckets of 50 kg up a hill, multiple times, all day long with no support?
That is when we realized that we needed to take action and motivate the farmers' children into the cocoa business in a sustainable and professional way.
We also had witnessed how women in agriculture work as hard as men but do not get a direct income recognition. Men receive the payment and pay for the living but we believe women should receive their income independently.
Action #3 is understanding that a specialized market recognizes the price in terms of how good and how special a chocolate is. Cacao was born in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador and out of all these countries Colombia is believed to be the richest in Criollo genetics, the finest variety in the world.
This exclusive genetic group accounts today for less than 2% of the world cocoa population and its the most aromatic. Our farmers kept this variety as war in Colombia prevented institutions from coming to these areas to change this genetic for more productive ones.
War was very negative for Colombia and specially for farmers in rural areas. It isolated them and created a lot of poverty and disadvantages. This poverty has forced rural areas to produce organically for decades, something we also want to take advantage of. Organic products are healthier and recognized in specialized markets. We actively encourage farmers to keep producing organically and control that they remain doing so in order to keep working with us.
We are the only company in the UK to make chocolates from the tree! Fermentation and drying are done in our facilities. This helps us to make the purest chocolates in the UK.
Responsible Chocolate also means to always explore ways to make a healthier and purer chocolate. This is why we were unroasted chocolate pioneers, 2-ingredient chocolate leaders (no extra cocoa butter), and are now the first to explore extended fermentations that naturally produce probiotics in the beans.
