Week 2 – US Cocoa
Day 1 – One World Trade Center, NYC
It’s a shame that our office in the beautiful One World Trade Center skyscraper is one of the company’s smallest because it’s a cool office. From the conference room there is a view looking straight up Manhattan with the Empire State Building right in center view. Tenants and guests of the building have access to a full-floor lounge on floor 60-something with a wrap-around view of the whole city. The cold brew at the café is also a steal at $5.14!
The United States is not a cocoa-producing country (maybe there is some in Puerto Rico or Hawaii), but it is certainly a cocoa consuming country. Our business in the US, at its most basic, facilitates this consumption. We import certain cocoa products, and we also have a processing factory.
While in Nigeria I got to see the production and procurement side of cocoa, so it was very interesting for me to see the import, sales, and processing side of the business. It was really my first opportunity in this company to do so.
Day 2
I enjoyed discussing and auditing the corporate responsibility and sustainability aspects of the business. Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa-producing country, and Ghana (#2) to a lesser extent, have child labor-cum-human trafficking problem in their supply chains. Adolescents from Burkina Faso and Mali are brought to the Ivorian and Ghanaian farms and exploited, sometimes receiving less than $1 USD per day for their work. The US cocoa business, and Olam in general, are constantly evaluating their supply chains to ensure they are free of exploitation-beans. A big part of this is buying certified beans, such as Fair Trade . I learned a lot of new things about these programs while in New York.
Day 3
Hump Day means finance and accounting. It was a real drag to get through all of it, but I could see that I was already following along better than the week prior with dairy.
We left the office early on Wednesday to head to La Guardia. We had a flight to Chicago, where the US processing plant is located (the South African was actually in Chicago the whole week, while the other three of us split the week).
Day 4
We spent Thursday and Friday at the cocoa processing factory outside of Chicago.This is my semi-amateur understanding of the cocoa processing process:
Raw cocoa beans are roasted and de-shelled before being ground up into a paste. This paste is known as cocoa liquor. Cocoa liquor is non-alcoholic and semi-viscous. Liquor as a product is traded on its own, but it can also go through more processing to produce other viable chocolate ingredients. If you press it through a sieve under the right conditions some of the fat content will separate out. This solid fat is known as cocoa butter and the solid substance left over from the liquor is known as cocoa cake. The first pressing of freshly roasted cacao smells absolutely intoxicating. It’s the aroma of s’mores at the campfire, pumpkin spice, and chestnuts roasting by the fire, all wrapped up in frankincense and myrrh.
Cocoa butter, while valuable on its own for chocolates, is considered more of a by-product of the fourth and final cocoa derivative-product, cocoa powder. The coca cake is ground down into very fine particles that contain a certain percentage of fat (fat that was not extracted during the prior sieving). Getting an optimum mix of fat in powder and butter is a science unto itself and beyond my rudimentary understanding of the process.
Chocolate is beyond the scope of the company for which I work. We do not produce any chocolate, aside from a few cookie varieties in West Africa. We sell our powders, liquor, and butter to confectioners around the world that add sugar and other ingredients to produce chocolate products. Even though the factory does not produce any chocolate it still had bowls full of chocolates for the delight of guests.
Day 5
While we got to tour the factory on Thursday and ask questions, Friday was more of an investigative day. At one point we even went on to the factory floor where we store cocoa to perform an inventory count. There we were, four accountants in a warehouse, literally counting beans.
Our cocoa brands