Virtual Entrepreneur

Organic Chocolate

Business Week:
There is sweet renewal on the old cacao plantations that just 5 years ago lay fallow on these lush mountain slopes along the Caribbean coast. Its mother is a lucrative niche market: organic chocolate.

Small farmers enticed by the promise of profits from chocolate’s essential ingredient are revitalizing cultivation of the once-neglected plantations. They swing machetes to clear weeds around trees from which purple, red and green cacao pods hang ripening. They prune the trees, harvest the beans and shovel out fertilizers made from natural ingredients such as rice hulls, coffee and the rough outer skins of cacao.

Oil began to eclipse cacao as a Venezuelan export in the 1920s, but connoisseurs praise the cacao for its aroma and various shades of flavor. This is due to a unique combination of ‘climate, light, water, wind,’ said Jorge Redmond, president of the Venezuelan Chocolatier El Rey, or The King, which sells non-organic bars locally as well as in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He’s working with a group of farmers to develop organic chocolate bars.

Africa is today’s big producer, but in the 17th and 18th centuries, Venezuela was a top exporter of cacao to Europe. Today much of Venezuela’s cacao is consumed domestically, but a 1980s glut brought down prices and the industry has stagnated, with farmers turning to more profitable crops such as plantains. Now, with specialty organic chocolates in vogue in richer lands, organic cacao is fetching as much as four times the price of regular cacao.

Tierra Viva, a Venezuelan nonprofit foundation, has started a project with a farmers’ association to produce organic cacao with an eye on Europe or the United States. Tierra Viva says it has funding from the Venezuelan government, the European Union and private companies.

Similar efforts in Brazil and Ecuador have successfully tapped into the specialty chocolate market. Read more.