|
In the middle of the floor of her company Mon
Choco's factory sits a grinding bike, surrounded by trays of
carefully sorted cocoa beans. Poured in a funnel, beans are
transformed into a paste by a grinder activated through
pedaling.
Mroueh, a 40-year-old Ivorian of French-Lebanese descent,
oversees the process from the time the beans are selected to
when they are transformed into candies, producing organic and
environmentally friendly chocolate bars.
"We really want to have a minimal impact on the environment by
using as little electricity as possible," Mroueh said as she
supervised a small team of employees in white coats sorting the
beans.
"My chocolate is made up of 70 percent cocoa and 30 percent
brown sugar. We don't add cocoa butter or plant oil. It's only
raw cocoa and sugar," Mroueh said.
The cocoa industry is threatening to the environment, including
by contributing to deforestation. Environmental campaign groups
say that Ivory Coast is at risk of losing all its forest cover
by 2034.
But organic cocoa beans are difficult to find in Ivory Coast,
where the overwhelming majority of farmers use chemicals and
insecticides.
As a result, organic chocolate is expensive to produce and
caters primarily to the European market. Mon Choco chocolate
bars sell for around 1,500 CFA francs ($2.60), a price that is
out of reach for most local consumers.
Mon Choco and other initiatives of the kind are developing in
Ivory Coast but represent a niche market of only 5,000 tonnes of
beans per year, in a country that produces more than 2 million
tonnes every year.
(Editing by Juliette Jabkhiro and Jason Neely)
[© 2019 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2019 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|
|
