 playing with your food. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid stand mixer in attachments. A wonderful panel you about to spend your evening with. I'm Angela Clutton, I'm one of the co-directors of the food season, working with Mr Thompson, who's the other co-director, and Polly Russell, who is somewhere in the audience, can't quite see. Hey Polly, who is the food season founder and curator. Season generously supported by KitchenAid, who you've just seen. This is the fifth year of the food season. We strive every year to put together a real eclectic mix of events, and we are absolutely delighted tonight to be delving into the delicious world of chocolate. We have plenty of chocolate at the end, so that's something to look forward to as you go along. As we delve into the issues, the social impacts, sustainability, all things do chocolate. We have one of our panellists joining us on Zoom, which is quite exciting, and I will let Leila introduce the panel. Just to introduce Leila Kazim, for anyone who isn't familiar, although any of you listen to the BBC Food programme, we'll certainly know Leila as being part of the core team. Also, judge of the BBC Food and Farming Awards, co-creator of Lonely Planet Book, the ultimate eat list, and does so much work across all kinds of online and print publications. We could not be in so far hands. I hope you'll have a wonderful time. Stick around to chocolate at the end, which had just been the foyer. Leila, over to you. Thank you, Angela. I don't think I've ever had such a wonderful introduction. That's it. Flattered. Good evening, everybody. How is everyone doing? Are you all excited about the fact we're going to be talking about one of the world's greatest food products over the next 90 minutes? Good. My name is Leila Kazim. Welcome to Beyond the Bar, The Chocolate Revolution. I think it's great that we're going to be discussing chocolate today, because who doesn't want to chat about chocolate? And it's an honour to be joined by three chocolate connoisseurs. Allow me to introduce you to Angus Thirlwell of Hotel Chocolat. We've got Chantel Cody, founder of the Chocolate Detective and Rococo Chocolate. And via the wonders of the internet, we have Nick Davis, chocolate producer and grower, and I don't know whether I should look here or I should look here, but I'm kind of like, hi, Nick. Great to have you with us as well. And also I think it's quite fitting that tonight's event is actually just a week before Easter, one of the peak chocolate buying and consuming points of the year. Not that chocolate is only for Easter. Of course, chocolate is for every day of the year. But I was wondering, a show of hands, who has already bought their Easter eggs in time for Easter? I would expect people turning up to this event to be well planned with their chocolate purchasing. There's quite a few hands here. I actually haven't. It's on my to-do list. But today's event, we are going to be discussing chocolate, but specifically the dynamics around producing ethical and delicious chocolate. And the format of the session is such that towards the end, I will be taking questions from both the audience here, and also those online. So do think up some tasty chocolate related questions as you are enjoying the discussion. And a little shout out to those online. Thanks for joining in. I've been told to remind everybody here not to forget to pick up your chocolate samples at the end. And I feel like we are only going to require one reminder for that. So I don't need to mention that again. For those online, I can only apologise that you do not have access to these samples because there are quite a few of them and they do look good. But hopefully you've been able to get your hands on some ethical chocolate and you can enjoy it as you are enjoying the discussion today. Panel. Oh, panel. Good evening. How wonderful to have you all. Chocolate. I mean, what a great topic. If we think about the cacao plant. So this is a plant that is native to South and Central America. It's been in cultivation for about 3,000 years. It's grown in a tropical band that wraps itself around the globe. And if we think about the cocoa that's produced from this plant, it's been on quite a journey. It started as an ancient spiced cocoa drink of South America. And today we can find the mass produced bars that were most likely to see in the shops. So I thought what we could do to begin. And Nick, I thought you would be best place to answer this first question is if you could give us an overview of the process of transforming cocoa pods into chocolate when done on a sort of small scale with traditional methods and how that process differs to the process used to make most of the mass produced chocolate we see in the shops today. Okay. It's a very lengthy process if we're being truthful. So fortunately I have a pod or at least one which we can use to hand. Okay. So this is how it looks like. This is a cacao pod. It's the fruit of Theobroma cacao tree, cacao tree, chocolate tree. It sort of grows off the main limbs of the actual tree. Okay. We would use like a, well here in Jamaica we use like long poles to put on how well the trees are pruned to pull those pods off the tree. Almost like a hook to just pull them away from the actual main body of the tree. When they fall we would break them open. We'd use like either a rubber mallet or we would use a machete to break open the pods. Machete not so good because you can damage the precious beans that you're inside. So inside you've got the outside let's start with that. You've got the outer protective shell bands. And then you've got the fruit body which is one of my favourite words in English language. The baba which is like 30 to 50 beans which is surrounded by a white pulp. That white pulp is the fruits which if you've never had the chance to taste I can assure you is one of the greatest things on earth not commonly eaten. Wow. It's just, and it's really key to, it's literally the key to everything because without that fruit we wouldn't be able to get the fermentation which transforms this seed into what we know as chocolate. So we've been, and this has been done for thousands upon years, years, we've then get these individual beans, we break them apart, we pull the sort of main pith or placenta away from the actual beans, put them into big containers and once they're in those bigger containers we'll put either banana leaf or other things on top to be able to start that fermentation process. The sugars from the actual seeds or at least surrounding them will start to ferment and it will change over a number of days. As we stir that it's going to reduce oxygen, that's going to almost like turbo boost the fermentation at various points. That's what we need, that's the key element and by varying how we ferment we can really change the flavours of the finished product even you know outside of like the genetics of the individual trees we'll talk about that later on but we can do a lot to change the ultimate flavour. We then get those beans, drive them for about five days, lay them out, different ways of doing it, some parts of the world it's laid out literally on the ground. Here in Jamaica it's on raised platforms and we dry it for about five days, how we dry it again can have a huge impact on the final flavour of the actual chocolate, of the cocoa and once it's dried we'd leave it to age and then we'd get the beans. When we have those beans we'll then break them down and we'll process them. What we do here in Jamaica and you spoke later about the traditional methods, the traditional methods of wands which are very here in the Caribbean not too dissimilar from the techniques of spice drink which you were talking about from Central and South America. So what we would do is we would get a mortar and mortar stick. I love how we say things in the Caribbean. So pestle and mortar okay we'd use something like a tropical hardwood like guango and you'd very roughly hew it out and then literally beat it until you are breaking down those beans into constituent parts. Releasing the cocoa butter which is natural within the bean. Turning it into almost like a rough grainy sort of like a Mexican style chocolate. Here in the Caribbean here in Jamaica we would add cinnamon nutmeg, bay into it as a prime example, ginger to be able to eventually turn that into a hot beverage and that's how I grew up knowing chocolate until the milky bucket and then everything changed. And then so how does this process differ if we're looking at chocolate produced on a mass scale. Is it quite similar just scaled up or is it actually quite a different journey? All of that process going up to the mortar and mortar stick okay so it hasn't changed you know it's still an incredibly labour intensive product to get it from literally from a tree to the bar but once you get to the point where you are starting to refine it when you're starting to turn it into cocoa product that's where you see the shift. So even bean to bar which is what I do is still relatively primitive in terms of what you're doing you're using a grinder to be able to mash and break the beans down into that liquid form. Whereas once you get to a more industrial stage you're using bigger machine free roll refiners which are creating a paste, you're using universal conches, you're using machines which cost hundreds and hundreds, millions of dollars to be able to to transform that into the finished product and that's where we see a massive change. You're talking about something which can be done very cheaply on a local scale but to be able to get it to that industrial scale the amount of research, the amount of knowledge which is in there is it's huge. Chantal what would you say are the main problems with the way that most chocolate that we find in the shops is produced today? I think the biggest challenge is turning the traditional model of growing cocoa beans and trading them as a commodity by exploiting humans which could be indentured labour, it could be slaves, it could be children and so turning that upside down and giving back to the farmers who grow the cocoa and where possible to start producing chocolate right there where it's being grown so that you can actually create a proper microeconomy on a small scale near to where the cocoa is being grown and there are some fantastic examples of that, I mean Nick is doing that in Jamaica, I've been involved with a little company called Grenada Chocolate Company who were really one of the very, very first I believe in the world this century in 2001, 2002 they started doing it and as Nick was talking about these complicated huge machines now you can get really tiny tabletop chocolate makers but just 20 years ago that didn't exist so the guys in Grenada who were one of them was a brilliant engineer Mark Green, he actually got some antique machines and he built some machines and he was always keen to try and make things appropriate technology but at the same time produce a really fantastic quality chocolate which is possible but it's definitely much, much more difficult because you're making the tropics, you've got the humidity, you've got the heat and potentially you might need a lot of power I mean they had solar panels on the roof of the factory so that mitigated the need to use too much electricity but I mean many, many challenges. You touched there about farmers, the actual people on the ground growing the cocoa what challenges do they face at the minute so there's often a lot of chat about the fact that farmers don't get paid fairly for what it is they're producing Well I think it's a global problem but particularly in places like the Caribbean and Africa we know that farmers the average age of a farmer is not young that the young people are not inspired to follow in their footsteps there's nothing cool about farming, they have a reputation the farmers have been wearing clothes that are dirty carrying around a cutlass and somehow that image the younger generation would rather have some nice trainers and track suit on so I think here we've had particularly in the pandemic people growing stuff in their window boxes, we have a slightly rarefied view of what farming and gardening is obviously in a tropical climate it's incredibly arduous you've got high temperatures, humidity, some of the cocoa's grown on very steep slopes and it's just a huge amount of work, you've got this fertile ground where lots of climbing you have to keep all that under control and some farmers use inputs, chemical fertilizers and insecticides obviously from our point of view we're very keen on organic farming so it's kind of wide, it's a bit as many different types of farming in cocoa as there are in other types of farming around the world Nick touched on child labour I don't know if anybody saw the Dispatches episode Channel 4 last week Cadbury Exposed put your hand up if you did manage to watch that, yeah it's worth catching up but I thought it was quite timely for this event but it basically showed that illegal child labour is being used to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury, Britain's favourite chocolate brand and the Dispatches team were under covering Ghana where children as young as 10 have been working gruelling hours to supply cocoa beans to Cadbury, so children as young as 10 working in the sort of conditions, the heat and the humidity to get your thoughts on child labour, I mean how much of a problem is it, how prevalent is it in the industry today Well I think the fact that it's still present is a bit of a stain, a big stain on the chocolate industry and it has been for way too long and the central problem isn't that Ghanaians don't love their children I can tell you categorically they love their children as much as people do if not more, the problem is poverty and when people become desperate and literally it's about how are we going to earn enough money to feed ourselves then it can be a choice between either my children go to school or they help get this crop in which we can turn into cash and then we can buy food and we can survive so they don't want to have to make that choice but that's the invidious position that is brought about by poverty so the simple answer is to pay more for cocoa and you might wonder why that hasn't happened and the central problem is the disconnection between the agricultural side that we started talking about and the luxury side where the markets are so although cocoa grows around the equator all the developed markets are in the northern hemisphere typically and it's been quite easy for long established chocolate brands to kind of have a veil hiding these two worlds and for this problem to be blamed on farmers low productivity, if only they could grow more cocoa then they would earn more but actually the farmers can't grow more because growing more will deplete their land and they're growing as much as nature is giving back to them so the problem is about the amount that is being paid for the cocoa and if that is put right then child slavery will be reduced to a very low level, I can't say it will ever be reduced in the same ways domestic violence will never disappear or things like that but at least the understandable reasons for it will be taken away so that's the kind of simple analysis and it is possible to put it right just by paying more and we know in our business that there is enough profit for the chocolate industry to pay more to cocoa growers and not kill your business and that's kind of exactly what we've been progressively trying to do at Horteshnokla we bought an old cocoa farm not that far away from where Nick is and where Chantel has a connection with Grenada in St. Lucia in the Caribbean so we learned from zero how to grow cocoa and educated ourselves on what the issues were and it was pretty clear immediately that the prevailing price of cocoa meant that you would walk into immediate loss from being a farmer of cocoa so we were lucky because we were selling the beans back to ourselves so I immediately piked the price up to the right levels so that our farm didn't make a huge loss because we're a direct to consumer business we were also able to talk to our customers and explain why this chocolate from St. Lucia was more expensive than our other chocolate and we managed to make it work and from that initial learning we've gradually been rolling it out and in November this year we launched in Ghana a new program where we're paying a much higher premium direct into farmer's pockets to make it right and make it possible to earn a living income as defined by the UN's measurement of how you should approach calculating what a living income would be in rural Ghana so we're making a lifetime commitment to keep progressively improving this as well because this is where I think with the dispatchers program the fundamental problem lay in kind of promising that you don't need to worry about that we've got it sorted as a brand and clearly that wasn't the case from the dispatchers expose and it really isn't the case ever with a complex crop like cocoa we will always have issues of global warming, we will always have issues of sustainability with people and with communities so to say that it's ever going to be tick done you don't have to worry about it is I think the fundamental problem it needs to be energetically focused on by the chocolate industry and there needs to be acceptance that we have to get better every year and it's an ongoing challenge for everybody there's also the thing about who are those children because some of them are the children of the farmers some of them are not that's much more concerning to me when if you're in a country which has borders and typically in the cocoa west Africa there's a lot of there have been many wars and political problems and leaky borders and it definitely is child trafficking going across those kids are not on anyone's radar they don't have a birth certificate or a passport and how can you understand what's going on when you've got such complexities I think in Grenada we can say that kids go to school free up to the age of 14 I have never seen a child working on the land they might occasionally go on to pick themselves a pod so they can suck the delicious fruit from it but that's a bit like scrumping an apple so yes I think it's nuanced and it's very different in different places but I mean the Grenada thing for me was the model of getting a cocoa farmer and showing him it was worth doing something with that cocoa to make it into chocolate rather than just leave it unpicked which a lot of them were doing because they could earn plenty of money picking nutmeg they didn't need to bother with the cocoa I mean nutmeg is a lot simpler than cocoa interesting and you know it's a real cash crop you pick it up from the ground get a sack full sell it that could feed your family for a month sadly since the hurricane there's not so much nutmeg anymore but for a long long time that was a very good staple earning power for farmers let's talk a bit about the solutions that are happening to try and address the problems in the chocolate making industry Nick you mentioned earlier bean to bar this is something I hear sort of banded about and it's also on the packaging of some chocolate can you just explain to us what that means please so bean to bar chocolate is relatively, relatively new concepts and it came about because people realise that they could hack chocolate they realise that you didn't need super expensive machinery in fact the person who was really behind the sort of growth of this is a guy called John Nancy in Eugene Oregon who realised that the dosa grinder used in Indian cooking was not a million miles away from the old Melanges used by you know Hershey's back in the day or Cadbury's and that if you refined down those beans if you broke them down using those stone wheels and the stone base you would eventually create a cocoa mass or liquor and then you could add sugar to it and then you could create these wonderful chocolates and then you could add good beans you had one of these machines you could make chocolate so we've seen a huge explosion as Chantal said earlier on when we're going to eat a chocolate company first started there were very few bean to bar chocolate makers the same thing for Angus as well there were a few people who were taking chocolate from bean to bar now pretty much anybody with like a countertop and 500 quids can make chocolate it's a blessing and a curse we've kind of democratised chocolate but now there's so much to choose from but not enough people who want to pay the money for that product that we find ourselves in a slightly difficult situation so bean to bar chocolate is really taking the beans from unroasted beans roasting them turning them into a liquor adding sugar and hopefully creating great chocolates being by bean to bar in its truest form this isn't a process that necessarily has to happen at source where the beans are grown it could be anywhere people importing the raw seeds and then producing the chocolate this is going to be controversial that's actually one of the biggest problems because in many respects bean to bar in country has huge impact because you are adding value in that country but as you know chocolate does not travel well okay so you know it's not the easiest thing to get from here in Jamaica over to where you guys are and so there are so many issues in regards to being able to do that that it makes it difficult but if we're talking about a really good way to be able to really make changes it is about being able to create in countries of origin be able to add value and by doing that you're also empowering those same kids a chance also to want to be farmers you know they don't see any value in it I always say if you asked a kid in rural Jamaica would you prefer to be struggling with internet or struggling without internet they'd always say with internet so you're not going to get that in rural Jamaica so people move into the cities where they have where they believe that there's more opportunities there's very little money which exists within cocoa in Jamaica I'll give everybody a really brief example when you buy the wet beans as I said which we transform into cocoa the cost or the price of the price which is paid to farmers here in Jamaica little income developing country is two thousand three hundred Jamaican dollars per box that's the equivalent of 18 quid to get a box of cocoa you need to break open 600 pots that's four hours why would anybody do that I mean why do I do that you know but it's because of that value at right I'm able to do the value add and I'm able to I'm able to impact but you know for the average person you know you literally have to be on the edge to even think that's a viable way to be able to make a living gosh I can't imagine the how hard that work must be as well in the sort of environment okay here is a question Shanta I'm going to ask you what does ethical chocolate mean what makes a bar of chocolate ethical that's a very tough question I mean for me it's about connecting right back to the source to the farmers to understanding more about the conditions that they're working in how much they're being paid what their lives are like because if you don't you know if you're just going to a shop you're paying a pound and you're buying a bar of something you know deliciously sweet and wonderful and you rip off the wrapper eat it you know usually the whole lot in one go throw it away and have no thought about it I think I think it's that thing of asking questions trying to understand really what's going on and I know there's one particular brand at the moment who are going on this slave free ticket but the chocolate they produce is pretty much like Cadbury's and it's being made in a huge factory in Belgium and now you know they're saying they have found children in the chain and that actually that's a good thing because it shows that the scrutiny is working doesn't quite cut it with me but I think it's about really trying to connect and to see you know people want to know about where their food's from I think you know ask the questions really try and dig deep and get some answers and I think the more we can get right back to the roots the better Angus do you think ethical washing is a good thing so where companies will claim ethical or green principles you know such as on their packaging but actually behind the scenes not much is going on and it's all a bit of smoke and mirrors is that something consumers need to be aware of well hugely and I mean you see it in all walks of life at the moment I mean for example compostable packaging in the UK it's very difficult to get compostable packaging to be composted because the waste management stream can't recognize the potentially compostable packaging and so it just goes into landfill where I've been made to understand that it lets off more carbon than non-compostable packaging so you know once you know that and you continue to position compostable packaging as a benefit it becomes green washing or eco washing and the same thing really in the chocolate industry it's I mean bean to bar has an advantage in that it's small scale chocolate making it's introducing the taste of cocoa rich chocolate to more people and that then leads to a more reverence for the cocoa bean over just chocolate and when we can separate the cocoa bean from poor quality chocolate then people are prepared well are interested and curious to know who the farmer is and what conditions are the beans grown in and you know to ask naturally curious questions that we might ask about the wine that we drink or the olive oil or the cheese and there's definitely chocolate is heading in the right direction there and there's nothing quite like consumer power to make brands do the right thing because I think in today's world the consumers that I get to hear from expect the brands that they spend money with to do the right thing wherever they can and they there's no excuse to not do the right thing once you have the opportunity you have the resources and you have the knowledge it's perplexing why you wouldn't do that it's important for consumers to keep the pressure on them and the real problem with greenwashing is it does a huge to service in demotivating well-minded consumers once they find out that it's fraud it then turns them off doing anything that's beneficial because you've kind of blown the credibility of a whole industry or you know an approach and that's incredibly dangerous so it's you know I think anybody in responsible brands who are trying to do the right thing really actively detest greenwashing Nick I wanted to ask you so you touched on this earlier about I guess the value this is sort of about restoring the value of chocolate because you know cacao is not an easy crop to grow we've already talked about the very difficult sort of heat and humidity of growing it chocolate is one of the most miraculous processes in the food world ever and yet quite often we still pay so little for our chocolate why is that well I'm going to go back to go forward I think not only do we have greenwashing I think we also have ethics washing as well there's a lot of craft chocolate companies who use we're working with small holder farmers to be able to improve their lives to also sell chocolate and it's not just because I'm a Brit that I'm cynical right but I'm very cynical when it comes to some of that sort of thing and I see it within craft chocolate as well you know it's easy to sell a bar if you're saying that you're helping farmers than actually giving you know that's a real issue which I'm a bit concerned about I think that there is a there's still a historical impact which plays a role with everyday commodity production within these countries which are often populated by people who are brown and black and I think that there is still the extraction of the value which which continues you know people have to make they have to make profit I understand that you know that's the basis of a capitalist system but you know there isn't necessarily about saying push back to be able to make sure that it's fair I think sometimes it just makes me really sad being in these countries because it seems so unfair and it seems so difficult in terms of how are we going to move past the point which we're in and I think a lot of the work needs to be done in our own countries the same as what's happening in Cote d'Ivoire the same as what's happening in Ghana to really push to try and see legislation change for money which has paid to farmers because the companies aren't interested it goes back to what Sharon Tyler was saying the second day they don't really care and we need to try and figure a way to be able to to empower to empower people to to care there needs to be an Angus no disrespect there needs to be about 10 companies of your size producing craft chocolate you know at a large scale you know 20 maybe more and we're not seeing that yet you know we're not seeing enough people who are willing to go into their pockets to pay a fair value for craft chocolate that's what's going to make a difference and if we don't I don't know if this is even well thought out Laila but you know instead of instead of us having a go at some of these these chocolate companies why don't we talk to the supermarkets you know where is most of the value where is most of the profit made in chocolates it's at the retailer stage so we need to be talking to X big retailer and say what are you doing to be able to put that money back in that they will probably just step away from it but you know maybe that's something which we need to look at making retailers take more of a more responsibility to make sure that they hold these companies to account because ultimately unless they're buying a product they're not making the money the other person who makes a lot of money is the Exchequer because there's VAT on every single bar of chocolate they do absolutely nothing to earn that it just doesn't run as revenue so they might even be able to start thinking about interesting ways in which they could encourage better practice It was funny because on this Dispatches episode there was a point where it had an infographic of a bar of chocolate and the percentage of each bar what percentage goes to different parts of the chain I think the farmer I think it was either six or eleven percent I know one's double the other but it was a small amount which I found quite incredible but the retailer got a big bit and so on so yeah there are questions I think need to be asked throughout the entire chain I wanted to ask about micro producers so we touched on this so the micro producers and I've got here that they make up just 20% of the market volume value wise so these are the people who will import the raw beans and then using their 500 pound countertop machine I might add this to my Christmas list do the whole chocolate making and processing themselves has sort of taken that away from the big processing giants Chantel what effect have these micro producers had on the chocolate making industry well I'm not sure really I mean Nick was touching on it earlier saying what it's done is it means there's a lot of craft chocolate out there so in a way everyone's competing with each other and if the consumers are still struggling with the concept that it's worth paying something more than a pound or two for a bar of chocolate there's a bit of attention there and of course it doesn't guarantee any sort of ethical trail to where they've got their beans from some of them could be amazing and they could have real relationships with the cocoa growers but for me it's just a micro scale of what the big industrial people are doing in a nice cold climate where it's quite easy to control everything so it's an easy and fun thing to do and there's another wonderful story about some hipsters who got found out for their poor practice at the beginning and they handled it so badly because they were in America at this farmer's market they were doing their little grinding and making some very good chocolate apparently but it sold out so quickly they couldn't quite keep up so then they started melting buttons from a very good producer chocolate and when they were asked and it wasn't just once it was repeatedly over the years they just denied it all they needed to say was look we're struggling to make the amount and this is a really good chocolate or they could have charged double for the one they were actually making compared to the one they're just melting down the beans but that didn't do anyone any favours it's interesting it's making me now because I've always thought oh if I am choosing a chocolate from a micro producer that is priced more than sort of mass produced stuff that's probably ethical but now I'm understanding that actually that doesn't necessarily isn't the case and we will touch on what on earth do we as consumers do when we're trying to choose at the checkout in the shop which chocolate to purchase because there seems to be a lot of things to consider so far I'm getting the idea that if a chocolate can be made at source where the cacao is grown that is the best situation for the local economies but Angus I wanted to ask you because I know Hotel Chocolat they bring the beans to the UK and you make the chocolate here is that correct so I wanted to ask how do you do that and if you could explain a little bit about what you do in St Lucia as well we do a bit of both really so most of our beans come from Ghana and those beans are roasted in Ghana and ground up into an intermediate stage which is called cocoa liquor and then cast into quite kind of rugged blocks and then put into container ships sent to the UK for further refinement and it kind of works because if the cocoa liquor melts and reforms normally that's a disaster for chocolate because you lose the snap and the careful arrangement of the cocoa crystals that gives you that gloss and a beautiful snap but at the cocoa liquor stage it's quite resilient and as long as moisture doesn't get in it can be sea shipped without needing to be air conditioned or anything like that so it's a good way of leaving adding some value in Ghana but then doing the more complicated temperature controlled stuff in a cooler climate Is it just really difficult to make chocolate in these hot humid places on scale chocolate covers a wide variety of different forms I mean we reference 3,000 years that humans and cacao have been kind of found each other although of that time only the last 200 years has been mostly about edible chocolate the preceding time was all about drinkable chocolate and drinkable chocolate is much more rich in potential to be made in country and consumed in country or shipped and exported from that country so I think that's one thing then you have solid chocolate bars that are much more resilient than a very delicate ganache or a praline that melts and can be damaged much more easily and it's typically more added value as well so hence if you have you know a 50 pound box of hot chocolate as finest which would be quite a big box like this if one of those chocolates gets heat damaged we would typically get a complaint from our customer and have to refund them so hence the control of temperature and humidity and careful management all the way through is absolutely vital in St. Lucia we roast the beans and make them into all manner of cacao products including a cacao pulp martini which when we saw the cacao pulp being raised up you can pull that pulp away and put it through a sieve and then put it in a shaker with some vodka and a bit of sour soft juice and it's... I mean could we get some of these with the tastings after this sounds I think we all should but it really illustrates the point that there's a lot of you know a lot of valuable parts in this amazing crop that comes from the cocoa tree that can be used in country and consumers are becoming more curious and adventurous about it so I think it's a good dose of creativity as needed and not to kind of fixate on how a box of chocolates has got to be made in a country that's way too hot to avoid them all melting That's really interesting so sort of considering what other products could be made from the rest of the pod and that would work being made in these environments Yes. Such as the martinis I was just going to come in, I was going to tell you the actual legal name of my company is temper tantrum limited not in joke but that shine and the snap which Angus was talking about when you need to temper chocolate in a chocolate environment it gets you very angry okay so temper tantrum limited if you want to check it out but no seriously it is very hard to do it in country as Angus knows as Chantal knows electricity in the Caribbean is prohibitively expensive if you guys are feeling the pinch now that is like an everyday reality in the Caribbean for the last 50 years okay it is so expensive for energy and again it's why what Mott and the team at Grenada Chocolate Company did was so ahead of so ahead of the curve by running the factory off solar you know it's something which I'm trying to move desperately towards right now but we face a lot of challenges not only with tempering not only with electricity not only with you know HVAC and AC and all of these things shipping it's a really difficult thing to do as a business in the Caribbean but again I do believe that the only way that we can almost inspire people to get back planting is to be able for them to be able to see value in what we do sorry well no that mean you've kind of half answered my question my next question which was going to be to you which was what are the main challenges so if someone is you know living at a source where close to where the crop is grown and they would like to pursue making chocolate there what are the main challenges and how many people are actually doing that now how are they able to and what is stopping more people from doing it because I feel like there's not that many people doing that now and it seems to be such an ideal situation in terms of the local communities absolutely I mean there's a few things that I apologise if I forget some of them but number one everything starts with beans as far as I'm concerned it's the quality beans if you have quality beans it's really difficult to mess up chocolate okay well it's possible a lot of people do that but it's more tricky right the problem is that a lot of the knowledge has been lost over time so prime example I know Jamaica very well in Jamaica the only people who were allowed after emancipation sorry after independence sorry in 62 to be able to process cocoa was in government for mentories and that's still a thing which exists in a lot of post-colonial countries Ghana as a prime example the only people who can buy beans are for governments they control for science they control facilities and it means that in some places Ghana again I believe as a prime example I have to get a special license to be able to buy beans you know so that means that the huge barriers to entry even here in the Caribbean for me to be able to have a trade license to sell Angus beans I need to have a farm which would make me one of the largest producers of cacao on the island right I'm not a multimillionaire so there's lots of barriers to entry which have historically been put in place to stop the small person to stop the small holder farmer being able to leverage up so that's one of the problems but if you get great beans okay it's all about the beans if you get that small holder equipment you can make chocolate and then once you start making chocolate you will improve your technique you understand more about how cocoa needs to be roasted you understand more about the processing you understand about conching how you can use heat to be able to improve the feel and the flavours of what are coming out of the chocolate all of those things can still be done at a small scale you can win awards I've won awards for my chocolate literally originally starting in this room before I got my bigger facility but that can all be done in country it's just significantly more difficult than if you're doing it in the US or Canada difficult but possible more than possible as I said I encourage people to do this because the more small holder cocoa producers we have in country the more incentivised people will be to be able to literally go back to their abandoned ruin at farms which exist right now I'm now switching to consumer mode and I'm thinking because the choice seems to be huge and lots of information thrown at us and things to sort of digest when we're trying to buy chocolate so what I've done is I've brought in three bars of chocolate from home and what I'm going to do because I see if we all sort of we're thinking along the same lines or not I'm going to just read a little bit of the information on each packet and then I'm going to ask the audience and also the panel if we have a consensus as to which one we think is maybe the most ethical which one is the least ethical okay these are just totally the bars that I have quite a lot of chocolate home this is a very small selection of what I've brought in okay first one is called chocolatea so this is number one chocolatea and it says so this is where beans are shipped across the ocean via wind power so via sailboat and also it says chocolatea is dedicated to the craft of small batch chocolate making from bean to bar there's that phrase using only the finest ingredients and it says the cocoa beans in this bar are supplied by the alliance of rural communities of Trinidad and Tobago an organisation committed to empowering a vibrant local food economy for the islands okay that's the first one chocolatea the second one I brought is called fire tree this says single estate Philippines Mindanao island and on the back it says it's got tasting notes mostly tasting notes and then it says al cacao is grown in the lush volcanic hills under a canopy of coconut palms sounds absolutely ideal the farmers divide the skills of harvesting and fermenting resulting in an exquisite chocolate that's kind of all the information that that one has and then I've got Whitaker's New Zealand artisan chocolate this is a flavoured chocolate it's coffee at the back it says that they have been making chocolate for generations and they combine the world's finest cocoa with the most delicious ingredient sourced directly from New Zealand's finest artisan producers no other information worth noting so this is number three worth noting none of these have any kind of certification or stamp there's no fair trade thing on it no rainforest alliance no organic okay so show of hands and then I'm going to ask the audience and I'm going to ask the panel what you think show of hands who thinks question which one do we think is the most ethical show of hands if you think number one chocolatea is the most ethical the three based on the information I have given you oh that's a lot of people okay that's a vast majority number two firetree okay we got a handful here this is the single estate in the Philippines number three Whitaker's New Zealand we got one at the front okay so okay I think the point of this exercise is that there is does not consensus based on the information given on the package and panel would you based on this information you know you're not going to go to the website at the point of buying you're just going to base it on what you can see would you purchase any one of these based on the information on the package thinking that it was ethical and equally is are there any that you would avoid based on the information on the packet well you're really putting this under the hot lamp here I find it really hard to answer this because I actually know two of those producers right and I do know they have good practice the third one which is the New Zealand one mm-hmm I feel like this is quite a well-known brand yeah well I don't know I haven't really come across it but my question is do they grow cocoa and coffee there they're talking about local ingredients which I suspect they don't grow them there so that makes me a little bit worried I think the chocolate is very transparent about exactly how they're doing it where it's coming from mm this did seem to have nice information and firetree are specialising in getting beans which I know they have grown very carefully supervised communities that grow the cocoa so it's definitely a lot better than the normal commodity trading thing and that they're extremely good chocolate makers that's so interesting because I had a hunch based on pure packaging or to be honest that maybe these were quite ethical but they hardly talk about it so not only are we maybe faced with ethical washing where people are over talking and we might also be faced with the fact that they're not actually sharing all the good stuff that they're doing so my question is what on earth should we look for as a consumer on a bar of chocolate if we want to try and buy ethical chocolate we have to go a little bit further than just the wrapper it's a bit if you to be very crude if you go into a shop to buy a bottle of wine and you could say you've got a choice between red white pink or fizzy that's it most people would understand there are huge differences among those categories and then you've got mass produced wines you've got organic wines you've got natural wines you've got particular great varieties you've got makers you know there are so many other bits of information but still people might well know more about particular producers who bother to communicate their story and I think that's where we're going with chocolate but it's taking much longer than it is in some other sectors Angus are there any things we should are there any pointers that we might but you know for example the certifications did they mean anything rainforest lines, fair trade, organic are they because these didn't have them and you're saying that you know two of these producers are pretty good so yeah I think I mean organic really means something and fair trade and rainforest lines are a minimum standard and it's quite often one size fits all for different geographies different agricultural types but they're way better than nothing and they're things to be supported but from a consumer's point of view I think if people are in a habit of buying chocolate in a promiscuous way of just sort of grabbing at things and expecting to know everything about a brand in about two seconds it's just impossible so I think we've got to be realistic here that if you're claiming to be a conscious consumer then please take the time to investigate brands you know there are websites there are questions to ask but the chocolate makers have to first of all promise something delicious that's the gateway into getting anybody's attention in the chocolate world and then the second thing which should underpin that is by the way we're a good brand and we're doing all the stuff you'd expect us to be doing and getting stronger at it every year so I don't know if there's any shortcuts if we want the chocolate industry to improve and we want to bring about a revolution then all of us consumers have to put the legwork in to decide which brands we're going to investigate and find out if they pass the sniff test or not and if you ask go ahead and buy them and enjoy them if not keep looking I mean our hero and mentor Nick and I he was really into organic because that was all about making sure that the land was protected the ecosystems were protected it's very very strict what you have to go through in order to get that thing and it's expensive but he didn't have any time at all for fair trade because he said it was a gravy train they have fancy offices in San Francisco people you know lolling around in their air conditioned cars and everything else and they're being paid by these effectively small people to get that certification so that I think there is quite a bit of greenwashing on that and it's a stamp which a lot of people will think if they see that on it that must be a good chocolate but I think it's really hard to show how much the farmers benefit from that there may be some very small incremental things which happen it could be a clinic gets built or a school which is good for all the community and I think that's great but I think it's not really what they're saying it is it's not making huge differences to the lives of those farmers. Nick what do you think are there indicators consumers can look out for I'm also thinking about price ingredients does that give an indication as to how ethical a chocolate bar might be? I mean you do have to pay people more go on to the website as Angus said there is information, Instagram is full of information I don't know the team from Chocolata but I know Runfalma I know that they have a cool sort of Barf Sirocco roasting machine from 1900s you know there's information out there for chocolate nerds if you want to look and that sort of gives an indication especially when you see their shipping cacao from Trinidad over those personal relationships make it very difficult to rip people off number one okay so when you see sort of a big company where there's no connection it gives you a few red flags as something is amiss the same thing with firetree you know I know that they source their cacao from areas which are volcanic you know it's kind of given away with the name all of those little things you can find online but you're right it's made me really think about what I do to be able to connect with the people who are going to buy my chocolate my chocolate is kind of quite frankly speaking it's very you know minimalist and I like it I like that style but how well am I getting across to the consumers that we're trying to do more and it's very difficult when you're a small company there's a lot of craft chocolate companies are to be able to build to be able to scale and have the money to be able to put into flash packaging but maybe we need to think about that but do you do flash packaging or making sure that you're the farmers who you're working with are paid fairly it's a hard one right it's for me it's a real challenge I've gone with paying more and dealing with more basic packaging you know I don't know where that's going to get me but hopefully I'll still be able to build another question to the panel is it possible to produce ethical chocolate on an industrial mass produced scale is that like an oxymoron in itself or is it actually I'm thinking like the Cadbury's Kit Kats but ethical is that even possible or do we always be in a situation where we have to do our research source the smaller micro producers Angus I'm happy to lead off I think it's only possible if the money's there and any analysis would tell you that well actually the money is there when you look at the profits that are available from either making small amounts of chocolate and charging a super premium price or making shed loads of chocolate that's quite cheap but actually if you look at the profits of some of the long established multi-nationals there's plenty profit there so it's you've got to believe it is possible and the way it's going to be possible is through unleashing consumer power and when consumers prioritise that in the choice of their brands then it will come to pass because that's what everybody runs a business on so it feels like the power really is in our hands the consumer how much pressure we put on chocolate producers and how much we make it clear that there are a certain set of ethical standards we expect the scale per se is not the blocker to actually behaving ethically so Ghana which I've come to know quite a bit about the way it's run by the Ghana coca board is very professional all the beans will be bought from every farmer who wants to sell them so that's kind of the best thing about the Ghana coca board the farmers don't have to worry about finding a market and by the way that's one of the problems that can occur with craft chocolate makers they tend to spread their favours around buying beans from one part of the world and then trying some beans from somewhere else and that's not that useful if you're a farmer because what you want is a long term relationship you want to know that you can depend on that buyer and you can invest in your business knowing that you've got a dependable and reliable buyer so the Ghana coca board operates at scale it's very professional and if the price is made right then the conditions begin for it to be ethical but there's problems of deforestation which again which is pretty rare in any type of crop cocoa actually loves to grow alongside other trees and other types of plants so biodiversity is not a problem for the cocoa tree in terms of yield it can coexist with other trees which for the chocolate industry is an amazing opportunity that can help combat climate change and can help bring biodiversity back that's not possible for lots of other food crops but it is possible for us in the chocolate industry we need to grab that and connect it with paying the right price which then rolls out an ethical behaviour and that kind of price is there for us to work towards and become an industry that we can all be really proud of Shantel what do you think? Well I think one of the really interesting things we haven't spoken about at all is sugar and chocolate the recipes and what people enjoy eating and I think we know there's an absolute epidemic of obesity all around the world and I think if we can have a better relationship with chocolate and learn how to enjoy darker chocolate what I found growing up as a child who could never get enough chocolate because there were too many children in my family who could inhale it and now I have the privilege of being able to work with some of the best chocolate in the world and I have a security blanket usually quite a lot of it around I tend not to eat very much but when I do I'm really enjoying it and I think when you have a really good piece of chocolate a bit like wine again that you will savour it much more if the quality is there if they change the way they relate to the chocolate then they might see it's actually worth spending more and eating less and they will get every benefit on every level through to their own health and get all the wonderful micronutrients that come from this fermented food that's a fruit and can be vegan and all those things so I think really good quality chocolate has so much going for it and when you put yourselves up about it too much you can make really good choices as a consumer Yeah and I think there's a whole thing in itself being more mindful about what we consume in terms of where we spend our money and the actual consumption of food as well Nick what do you think? Do you think it's possible to have a huge brand that's mass producing chocolate that could actually be ethical or is it just a pipe dream? I don't know the intricacies of their business but there was a company which Chantal made reference to in terms of producing great curvature melting chocolate early on they produce great chocolate it's used by chefs all over the world and from my experience of seeing how they operate in this country how they source their cacao here or in the Dominican Republic they pay small big chocolate company I think they have profits of nearly a billion or something like that but that's tiny in comparison to a lot of the big chocolate companies that's possible but they have a market who appreciate and are willing to pay that a little bit more they have the top chefs who are willing to pay that money for the product people when they buy their bars to eat but they have a market at the moment we need as you say ethical consumers we need people to be able to vote with their pounds and until we get that there's never going to be a change because ultimately these are huge and companies when we talk about the chocolate companies they have been around for such a long time I mean like literally like over 100 years, 120, 130 years and we're trying to challenge them they are ahead of us in terms of market penetration they are ahead of us in terms of technology they are ahead of us in terms of hiring some of the best best brains within science to be able to give them that competitive advantage we've got a long way to go but we need the support of the consumer to be able to get us where we need to go okay I think that's a key kind of point for everyone here and tuning in to take because I probably didn't acknowledge that quite enough about the power of the consumer to make sure our voices are heard in terms of what we are looking for when we want to buy chocolate now I'm conscious of the time and I want to make sure that there's time for people to ask questions but I also want to make sure that everybody knows exactly about the samples that reminder number two you will be picking up at the end of the event and incredibly all three of the panellists have provided some sample chocolate samples for everyone to take home so I think it would be good to know what it is that we've got Nick can we start with you these came from Jamaica yes yes fortunately I was able to come over recently and have a wonderful visit with my mum which is great after two and a half years and I brought some chocolate and I had samples which I brought over so that is our blue mountain bar so it's a 71% and it has Jamaican blue mountain I mean Angus is just diving right in now everyone else has their samples and you'll be able to pick them up sorry Nick carry on blue mountain slow your roll Angus blue mountain coffee is the best in the world and it's just a really nice combination to be able to put into a chocolate would you recommend we have this enjoy with a coffee because that is quite how I like to enjoy chocolate actually sometimes with coffee listen it's like denim on denim I'm never going to tell anybody also what grows together goes together right I love that yeah absolutely yeah okay I stole that from somewhere else Shantel what I mean God I mean Shantel's giving we've got three there the first one, number one on the label is the Grenada 71% this actually did come again in a sailboat in blocks so it was made 100% manufactured in Grenada but melted down and turned into very thin pieces which wouldn't survive for two seconds in the tropics but it's a really nice thin snappy chocolate that's organic but it's when we sell it like that we can't call it organic okay then we have a second one which is a very dear friend of mine called Susanna Cardenas from Ecuador she's doing work with heritage cacao plants the trees and it's got a very very different I mean the Grenada is very robust and fruity and all sorts of notes from sort of plum to leather and hay and all sorts of things this one is very very dramatically tropical fruit so it's pineapple and coconut but that's this particular flavor profile it's really quite delicate and they're both 70% but they're very very different and I think people who are challenged by dark chocolate usually love this one because it's very gentle and then the last one number three is a salted caramel mini egg made in France from Ecuadorian beans so it's made on a bigger scale than I can make them but I think they're a good maker and it's something to keep for Easter Sunday oh my god that's so sweet this is my first Easter egg of the year that's great and Angus we also have a lovely package from you look at this tell us what we've got yes so we've got two chocolates we have a we call it baton it's like a long thin piece of chocolate the beans were grown on our own organic cooker farm in the Caribbean I know some members of the audience have already been and inspected them the recipe we've gone for is 70% so it's not kind of too intense the flavor notes of the soil is very volcanic in this part of the south west there's this huge volcanic recent activity soil is very special and the flavor of the cacao is sort of brooding it's definitely got a kind of hint of something very kind of dark and powerful about it yellow fruits come through in quite a subtle way and something else that's like a kind of whiskey kind of edge so not a shrinking violet of a cocoa bean by any means and then we also have a portion of a drinking chocolate so this is something that you can make at home it's totally unsweetened so it's 100% cacao beans these ones are from Honduras they're a particular type of cacao called Mayan red and the red does come through in the red fruits, it's got a hint of spice about it and literally there's no sugar at all so it's pretty hardcore so when you're making it you can experiment and see, you can make it with water if you're super hardcore with milk the black toes brings a certain element of sweetness and helps round it but just play around and experiment with it and you've got two very different beans there wow, I mean how lucky are we and I feel like that has made the ticket price worth it alone if we're honest massive thank you to all three of you for those samples I would now like to take some questions from the audience and I've also got an iPad here for online questions too so let's just first get a show of hands so I can get a microphone over to somebody ok, this lady in the pink scarf at the front please, but while someone with a microphone is getting over, would you like to raise your hand again sorry, that's it ok, let's have a look right I'm going to go with just number three Karen Smith so question for the panel what is the difference between roasted and unroasted as some craft chocolate makers make unroasted bars oh nice one so that's the raw cacao which is definitely a thing in certain circles personally, so where they've made they don't ferment they effectively are not fermented beans so then it's not chocolate well, it's quite a good area of debate personally I want someone believing where we could just say for another I think that it's an essential part of the flavour profile of the bean to ferment it and I think most processing the temperature needs to be raised a certain amount to make the beans safe as well and the roasting as well so there's quite a complex thing about the sort of the microbial activities and things as well so when we see unroasted and roasted it's to do with whether it's been fermented well there are many it's just a rather different process which is followed, I think Nick maybe has something to say about that yeah, I mean I it's about how much how you like your chocolate but the sort of raw in terms of unfermented is going to be a very different flavour experience to if you have a chocolate which has been fermented and you've really brought out those chocolate notes that's how we've traditionally done it I mean some people will say that the unroasted chocolate has a again a different flavour to it but there's a whole chemical reactions mayard reaction in terms of how you're bringing out flavours within the chocolate which are lost when your chocolate is unroasted and there's also the kill steps you know E. coli is a real thing people and so basically putting in place things like roasting chocolate is a good way of making sure that your chocolate is safe as far as I'm concerned but they will put in different kill steps themselves, they may steam their chocolate not taking it above a temperature where the sauce has been roasted but for me personally I like chocolate roasted it's just for me that's what it's all about, that's where the flavour is for me what about you Angus? I think if you imagine a farm setting when the beans have come out of the wild fermentation by the way unlike the way wine is made where the winemaker imposes a yeast culture into the grapes to control the fermentation the way most of the world's cocoa has grown is entirely wild fermentation so whatever is floating by in the breeze in terms of yeasts activates the sugars and kick starts the fermentation so chocolate is a wild fermented product which we don't make enough of but once the beans have come out of the fermentation boxes they're really sticky and they've gone brown and they need to be dried and they're typically put out on racks and we're talking about farms here, we're talking about next to the rainforest in a lot of cases and we're talking about the tropics where there's more biodiversity and flora and fauna than anywhere else on the planet so overnight there's all sorts of things scurrying around and believe me when you know that you'd like your beans roasted because there's an important kill point where the temperature goes that just kills all the bacteria that may be there as well as developing these amazing flavonets. Okay so raw cacao nibs so that's not it's not roasted I think there's a difference between unfermented cacao or cacao that's been fermented and then you choose whether it's been roasted or not which I think is actually potentially the question okay so if we just assume that everything's been fermented then the choice is yeah if you don't have it roasted then the flavours are more stringent and you risk you're under risk of potentially being in hospital for a long stay. Now I was thinking raw cacao nibs was a health food well there is a way of pasteurizing them but it's yeah anyway that's interesting. You can see we're all school on it. I think also I might be wrong on this but I'll ask Nick is there any wild animal that will eat the raw bean? Not in its entirety but like rats are our biggest issue but they're eating the fruit aren't they? They're eating the fruit so they'll get into the fruit but you know there have been people who have like taken a you know a freshly opened eaten pod and put it into the ferment especially when you're paying people not very much money. People will do that It's like remember they've been paid by the wait so they don't care what goes in there so you'll find like bullet casings you'll find like bits of string you'll find coffee beans, stones everything makes it in but when you pay people decently they tend to give you quality Back to this question over here please Hello Thank you, you have answered my question Was it this question? Isn't that a coincidence? And what do you think about raw cacao? I haven't had very much of it but I know people who are very keen on it so really what I wanted to know was what the difference in production was and what the issues were and you've answered everything That's handy, two for one That was good There was a lady up here in the leopard print Hello I'm Dana, I'm a food policy student I'm writing an essay on cocoa at the moment so this is such good timing I can also answer the value chain bit so it's 6% farmers 7.6% processor 33% manufacturer and 40% retailer So that's the difference I wanted to ask a bit about commodification of cocoa and about the world cocoa price so 70% of cocoa comes from the Ivory Coast and Ghana and that's all linked to the futures market and that in effect means that the big manufacturers can say that they don't really have anything to do with the cocoa price because they can say that that's determined by the futures market which means that they can put their hands up and say that's nothing to do with me which means that they can really quite easily say we don't really have to change our price because it's determined by the futures market which means it's very easy for them to be hands off and say we don't have to change our price So I wondered what more you could say about the global solutions to the farmer income problem because at the moment the research indicates that 75% of consumers believe that chocolate companies already act ethically so when you have that on one side and manufacturers saying cocoa price is nothing to do with us it does feel a little bit damning in terms of what the future is for farmer income sorry if that's a bit depressing No well it's fantastic we've got chapter and verse here except you didn't tell us about the VAT but I think probably Angus might be a good person to answer that question but I mean I would say just simply is if we could have a more direct relationship with the growers and cut out the commodity market for me that's the easy answer but I know life is not as simple as that Yeah and I think the way to try and make sense of it is to think of the kind of multiple steps that are taken from the farm gate right to you getting your chocolate product back at home and the exchanges that have to happen the value exchange is all the way to give everybody their cut along the way the way to do the right thing as a chocolate maker is to have a relationship with the farmer directly and that means that you are disintermediating the future's the market you're not buying from the market you're buying from real people and that's a direct relationship so I think the fact that Kakao can be a speculated commodity is absolutely terrible I mean we're talking about people's livelihoods here but the way that it works in Ghana the Kakao Board buys at price X and then it sells into the global commodity market at price Y and the difference funds about 20% of the Ghana Exchequer so the roads, the hospitals are paid for off the back of the Kakao farmers and that's the way that the Ghanians have chosen to the way they want to do it the recourse for a brand like Hota Chocolate is to say we respect what you've done there are good things about that structure in terms of efficiency and being a guaranteed buyer the way to make it right for us is to say we'll just pay extra direct to the farmer then and the Ghana Kakao Board has no problem with that and we had meetings with them and checked it and they said no if you want to do that that's fine and we'd encourage you there's nothing that we have against that at all if you want to top up go ahead well that's the thing so we're hoping that people will will follow I mean we're in a lucky position because we have a direct relationship with our customers so we can explain what we're doing and we can help build support it's bit different when there's a huge supermarket in the middle and you're perhaps dealing with the chocolate buyer who says they're going to delist you because you're trying to do something different potentially but the thing to cut through is consumer power because everybody listens to the consumer the big supermarkets, the big multinational chocolate brands, everybody so if we can make our program work which we only started in this stepped up way in September having spent 15 years learning the market growing in St. Lucia then we'll be able to transparently report on it and it's there for anybody to follow and we'll share information really openly and be as supportive as we can I think there's a piece about technology as well which some other industries like Rose growers and coffee people around the world often are using mobile technology to get prices and to make connections directly into markets and this seems to be again cocoa farmers don't appear to be engaging with that but I think that could be something interesting. It is looking promising in Ghana more than pretty sure more than 50% of our farmers are getting their premium payments at the end of the season directly into their mobile phones in their bank accounts so it's it is beginning and I think with block chain as well that chain of custody can be even tighter and I think there's a real revolution as a possibility which is that if people really really want to get involved they could try and actually make a connection for example Grenada chocolate company sorry I keep mentioning it but they through the pandemic they're pretty dreadful time and the final straw is that the little building where they were making their chocolate has been taken back by the landlord because he wanted to live in it which is fine it's absolutely it was his family house I don't think he was expecting it to be a chocolate factory for 20 years and there had always been a vision to build something which was more of a purpose built building but that is an actual project that people could invest in. It's just how to make that business model where someone can say I care this much about my chocolate and I'm actually prepared to back it properly and then I will know that all the chocolate I get has come from this particular source and all of these things have been done and really you can tick those boxes and eat something delicious at the end of it. And I'm going to say there's time for one more question they've all come up now goodness okay there's a mic over here so let's go right at the back please thank you I was just wondering a company like Cadbury's has been called out for its connections to slavery as far back as of 1901 after the abolition of slavery they've been called out for buying cocoa beans knowing full well that slavery has been a part of the process even then they were so closely connected to their Quaker roots and accepting that of course there is a lot that consumers can do there's power behind every purchase that we make but when you look at a company like Cadbury's and think about the amount of money that they're making and how long it would take for us to convince them that they really need to change should there be something happening at a government level or just is there something else that consumers can be doing aside from buying good chocolate to show that we want more to be done to reform the industry Nick did you what are your thoughts on that yeah it's tricky some people say that we should be taking more direct action like not buying from these companies but the impact as Angus was saying can you imagine just removing 20% of you know foreign exchange from the country I mean it would be devastating it's interesting earlier when we spoke about chocolate when I lived in Cornwall when I lived in Falmouth I remember that a lot of people in that community never never had sugar with their tea or coffee and it's because it was literally it was like a hangover of the moral stance the communities took during the period where you know sugar was obviously linked to slavery and I think that we need to think of more direct action ways to be able to try and elicit change for us to be able to move things on because you know I often joke that the longer I stay in chocolate the more I'm moving towards being a Marxist because things are just so unfair with the way the system is based and it just changes it just changes your view on the model you know so I would love to see us take the argument to the governmental level but unfortunately you know the people of the wallets have a lot of power you know they're able to lobby they're able to give reasons why there shouldn't be change and again I think it's up to us to hold them accountable I'm I think we should end it on that point because I just cannot be the person between you all and your chocolate tastings anymore and feel the mounting pressure what an absolute pleasure and thoroughly interesting chat with the three of you I'm sure everyone else would echo those thoughts thank you so much it was really enlightening Nick it's such a shame that you're not here but now the Angus and Chantin will be outside feel free to chat with them a little bit longer if you're able to stay around and if you didn't get your question answered and it's been a pleasure thank you so much and I hope you enjoy your chocolates thank you playing with your food that's the mark of a maker the KitchenAid stand mixer and attachments