This is me in Madagascar, in a cocoa manufacturing plant, and this is a cocoa bean. And this is quite a lot of cocoa beans here. But Madagascar is not only known for cocoa, think of its vanilla, among the finest in the world.
Malagasy cocoa is renowned for its quality. In fact, the country is in 14th place in the world production rankings. Now, I won't tell you all my misadventures in this country, a country marked by extreme poverty, think about it, it is among the ten poorest countries in the world, but still inhabited by extraordinary people and by a culture, the Malagasy one of Austronesian origin, which it is fascinating and unique.
Of course, Madagascar is not just cocoa, it is a land of extraordinary biodiversity. But to talk about cocoa on a large enough scale we necessarily have to look elsewhere, towards the true global cocoa giant. This is the Ivory Coast, a West African country just above the equator, and these were its forests in 1990.
In 2000, just ten years later, the green patches of the Ivory Coast they had reduced considerably and in 2015 they even seemed to have disappeared completely. All to get this, chocolate. ENERGUMENI, POUR ME THE CHOCOLATE!
Because those disappeared green spots that you saw in the photo are precisely because of the cocoa trees. Cocoa trees, 5 or 10 meters high, produce a very strange fruit, the cabossa, which in turn contains dozens of seeds, the cocoa beans. Once roasted, the beans are crumbled and used to make chocolate.
It is for cocoa trees that the forests of the Ivory Coast have made room. And there is a very specific reason. Without the soils of the Ivory Coast we would not have the cocoa necessary for us to enjoy this beautiful chocolate bar full of processed and industrialized sugars, so processed that, although it is a 90% bar, the cocoa will be an infinitesimal part and.
. . Sorry, I was getting off topic.
Ivory Coast produces 2 fifths of all cocoa worldwide. 20% of the national GDP and 40% of its exports depend on cocoa. And apart from Indonesia, which is the third largest producer, and a few other South American countries, 70% of global cocoa production comes from Ivory Coast and 3 other West African countries.
Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon. In other words, our unbridled chocolate consumption depends on a handful of states. But now let's ask ourselves some questions, as it is usually good to do every time.
How is it possible that cocoa production is so concentrated in just one area of the planet? What does this particular supply chain mean for those states and for us ? And above all, how do we manage to have our much-loved chocolate on supermarket shelves?
The answers to these questions have to do with both history and economics. But before proceeding I would like to thank the partner who made this episode on the history of food possible. Humamy.
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With this amount you will have an unlimited supply of dishes, so let's say that to try Humami for the first time it's not too bad, at least plan the fridge. Maybe unlike me. What are we eating tonight?
The fridge is empty. And now to us. Where does this stuff come from that is so addictive to some of us that we want to eat it every single day?
As mentioned, it all starts with the cocoa tree, whose scientific name is Theobroma, literally food of the gods. The Swedish botanist Linnaeus gave it this name in 1753 , but cocoa has its original roots in Central America, not in Sweden, in what is now Mexico, where it was domesticated for the first time around 3000 BC. Its greatest admirers were the Maya, who considered cocoa fruits a gift from the feathered serpent Kukulkan, and then the Aztecs.
The Aztecs, between one sacrifice and another, because they, yes, killed plenty of poor people unlike the Maya, used cocoa beans in the most disparate ways, as a currency of exchange and pay for the military, as medicine, as aphrodisiac, and for practicing religious rituals, but also for mixing particular drinks. They were produced by drying cocoa beans and shelling them in water, then adding pepper, chili pepper or vanilla. In short, a sort of primitive Nesquik milk without sugar.
The emperor, the nobles and the soldiers, who were the only ones who could drink this mixture considered divine, called it Xocolatl, that is, bitter water. And this is where the word chocolate comes from, even if a lot of water still had to pass under the stitches before having bars, pralines, Sacher cakes, hyperglutinising and diabetic. Now, until 1500, we Europeans didn't even know what cocoa was.
The first to import it into the old continent was in fact the old exterminator of natives, Hernán Cortés. Within a few decades the conquistadors came into possession of the Mesoamerican cocoa plantations, so as to produce Xocolatl for them. Although with some modifications to sweeten it, this Proto Nesquik became very popular among European aristocrats, especially in Spain and Catholic countries, since in places like England and Holland tea and coffee were preferred at the time.
This at least until the first industrial revolution led to a revolutionary invention which, in the history of chocolate, has the same value of the discovery of fire for human beings . We are talking about the cocoa press, created in 1828 by the Dutch chemical entrepreneur Casparus van Houten, although the invention is erroneously attributed to his son Conrad. This machinery allowed, yes, to shell the cocoa beans, but also to remove the so-called cocoa butter from the resulting powder.
The latter could thus be used to create chocolate that was no longer liquid, but solid, in a bar. From that moment on it was a race to find the most cunning and innovative master chocolatier. In 1867 the Swiss pastry chef Heinrich Nestlé, better known as Henry Nestlé, yes, that Nestlé, developed a particular method of condensing cow's milk .
Method which in 1875 allowed the master chocolatier, not Lindt, but Daniel Peter, to put milk chocolate on the market. Four years later, Rudolf Lindt, this time yes, the real Lindt, invented the machine for conching chocolate, a process that made it smoother, tastier and sweeter. Today Nestlé and Lindt Sprüngli are among the world's leading chocolate producers.
Finally, at the beginning of 1900, the American entrepreneur Milton Hershey brought the production of chocolate to an industrial scale, building a real city around his factory , which is located in Pennsylvania and is called, coincidentally, Hershey, even having it built another in Cuba, from where he obtained cocoa beans directly. Basically a kind of Willy Wonka. Although little known here, The Hershey Company is also a global chocolate giant.
Here, the fact that Hershey had to travel all the way to Cuba to obtain cocoa beans allows us to talk about what has always been a big problem for the chocolate industry, namely the difficult availability of the raw material, of the cocoa itself . In fact, cocoa trees can be grown and made productive almost only in tropical areas. Warm and humid areas, possibly close to the equator, through frequent and abundant wetting.
Philippines and Indonesia, for example, were carpeted with slave plantations by the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. But then, when the slave trade was abolished in every part of Europe in the mid-19th century , almost everyone found it more convenient to move cocoa crops directly to the West African colonies. Both those crafty French people on the Ivory Coast and those nice English people in Ghana and Nigeria took advantage of it.
And from there, as we saw at the beginning of this video, the cocoa never moved again. And this, in economic terms, is a significant problem. Since the Second World War, the consumption of chocolate, or at least ultra-processed chocolate, has increased dramatically, so much so that today in the West virtually anyone can afford it, with Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Norway being the most greedy for it.
So much so that Switzerland is today the land of chocolate. After all, we come from the country of chocolate. However, the costs of cocoa are by no means negligible.
If, as in 2024, for example, production in Ivory Coast and Ghana is affected by adverse climate or some disease, cocoa supplies decrease and prices increase. The question you might ask yourself at this point is. .
. what are the steps in the cocoa supply chain and therefore also chocolate? Let's start from the chocolate laboratory, the Ivory Coast.
Here, since independence in 1960, cocoa cultivation has always been encouraged by the government, even more so since the 1990s , a period of great economic liberalization, when he understood that you could really make a lot of money with cocoa , and so he started deforesting. From 1990 to 2020, Ivorian forest hectares shrank from 8 million to 3. The free market, however, favored large companies rather than local workers.
And so… here's how it all works. Local cocoa cultivation depends almost entirely on around 800,000 farmers, who own small farms of up to 3 hectares. Once the beans are obtained, farmers then resell them to wholesalers in inland towns such as Mann, Boisflet and Dewequee.
From here wholesalers ship the beans to the country's two main port cities, San Pedro and the capital Abidjan, and it is at this precise moment that multinationals come into play. Initially these are companies unknown to most, but they play a key role in mediating between cocoa producers and chocolate consumers, that is, ourselves. To give some examples, we find the US companies Cargill and ADM, the Swiss Ecom and Barrique Lebaux and the Singaporean Olam.
All of these are specialized, more or less, in processing cocoa beans or selling them to the global chocolate production giants, who ultimately only have to deal with manufacturing the chocolate, processing it, packaging it and putting it on the market, unless they choose to grind the cocoa from them. In order of size, these confectionery titans that achieve billion-dollar sales are the American Mars Wrigley, that of Mars so to speak, Mondelyse, that of Toblerone, the Italian Ferrero, Hershey, Nestle, Lindt and Sprüngli, the British Pladis, the Japanese Meiji, the South Korean Orion and the German August Stork. It doesn't take an economic genius to understand that this system is extremely unbalanced.
Algezira headlines that Ivorian cocoa farmers are barely surviving while chocolate companies' profits grow. For Oxfam, the cocoa market is a tremendously unequal market. According to a study by the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, the average income in Ivorian rural areas where cocoa is grown amounts to 6,500 dollars, yes, but per year, for a family of 7 people, who manages a farm considered large.
And chocolate companies really like this system, in fact it would be good if it were maintained because it allows them not to pay any employees to grow the cocoa and to have the seeds ready to be ground. The government of Abidjan, however, doesn't give a damn as long as cocoa is exported and as long as multinationals continue to operate on the national level, thus enriching the lords in government. And this is a situation that does not only concern Ivory Coast, but also all the major cocoa exporting nations, and then in reality there is something else.
And that is that, crossing various estimates made by the States, by Fortune magazine and by the corporate accountability lab, cocoa production in Ghana and Ivory Coast employs almost two million children, aged between 5 and 12 years. We have known about child labor in the cocoa industry for at least 15 years, and even before that we have known that every year thousands of children are kidnapped in other African countries, transported to West Africa, and then enslaved to work on cocoa plantations. In other words, it may be, it is not certain, but it may be, that the chocolate egg consumed at Easter is the result, in some way, of a slave exploitation which, apparently, never really ended in 1800 What are you saying ?
Do you also think like Uncle Turiddu? He also told you by chance. .
. But what do I care, their problems, I'm here consuming ultra-processed chocolate that I pay for with my hard-earned money and not you. .
. Shhh, shut up Turiddu, make some chamomile and go to make out, go to sleep. We have been talking about solving these problems for more than twenty years now , and these problems have not been solved since then.
Over time, the pressure on the main chocolate industries from associations and public opinion has been of little or no avail , despite grandiloquent promises made by one or another multinational to completely eradicate child labor within the given year. As long as they don't care about it, we might as well ride the wave and we might as well shove chocolate in our faces as always, because it's that little vice that for some is so good and satisfying and almost like a drug, not for me because chocolate is so I only eat under threat. I've been part of the savory team all my life.
And while cocoa farmers are starving , we are here discussing how chocolate can be included in a balanced diet and Americans even see it as the netter of the gods, or as junk food that is nice to gorge on in a day out of hand, perhaps on the same day that they train their legs. Why is American chocolate, asks a Guardian columnist, so disgusting? It tastes like sawdust soaked in a child's vomit.
Maybe it's even better than the chocolate we find in the supermarket. The vomit sawdust I mean. In any case, no matter how much effort we make in promoting fair trade and controlling the cocoa supply chain, the chocolate industry will always be here.
For us. The value of the global chocolate market amounts to 120 billion dollars a year, it will be worth 160 billion around 2030. And this is without taking into account that there are at least two large markets where chocolate is appreciated, but has never taken root as it is here, namely China and India.
To give an example, in China the most popular brand is the almost unknown Dove, owned by Mars, while in India it is Cadbury, a subsidiary of Mondelēz. The dilemma always remains the same, cocoa grows and will continue to do so only in tropical regions, in a few countries of the world, but in the meantime global demands for this product are increasing and when West Africa is no longer enough, where will we go to get the cocoa ? One thing is certain, we are not so different from the Aztecs, we use chocolate in hundreds of different recipes, we take it as a medicine for the mind, to relax and we still recognize its aphrodisiac effect today.
But above all, as economists Ellen Polmans and Johan Svinden say, in the ancient American empires cocoa beans were used as currency, today chocolate is also seen as a gift, a gift, and certain products have been explicitly designed and created in this way. sense. Next time, however, I'm sure we 'll all think twice before pronouncing the most classic of phrases, namely, what could be a bit of chocolate?
Or when Uncle Turiddu comes to tell you with his usual calmness, oh shit you can't eat anything calmly anymore after your videos on the food series, you will answer him, for me, uncle, you can eat that what you want, the important thing is that you nourish your brain with the awareness of what you are eating, this is ultimately what distinguishes us from free-range beasts, the choice is yours and it is free, per aspera ad astra.
