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Having delivered an order to Sainsburys with
only ten minutes to spare, Jo Fairley decided she
needed a second source of organically-grown cocoa
beans for her Green & Black’s chocolate. A port
blockade in politically-volatile Togo, West Africa,
had delayed the dispatch of beans for chocolate
manufacture and put her Sainsbury connection in
danger.
She recalled drinking chocolate with Maya
villagers in Belize, Central America, descendants
of the first people to grow cocoa as a crop. She
decided to find out about buying beans from them.
The result is one of the more startling
small-business success stories of 1994 which has
given a good price and an assured market to over
140 farmers.
Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate,
flavoured with orange and local spices, won the
newly-created Fairtrade mark, was taken up by all
the major supermarket firms and is helping Green
& Black’s towards a £1 million turnover,
more than double last year.
Jo Fairley, who featured in BSkyB’s Go for
Green and was Britain’s youngest magazine
editor at 23 when she edited Look Now, describes
herself as a lifelong chocoholic. She got into
chocolate-making three years ago through finding a
few pieces on the desk of her husband, Craig Sams.
“It’s the best I’ve ever eaten,” she said.
It had been made at Bordeaux for André
Deberdt, a French agriculturalist who was trying to
help Togolese cocoa growers. Their beans, grown
without chemicals, did not earn them enough income.
Perhaps if a top-quality chocolate were made from
the beans, they would earn more. He sought Sams’s
help with marketing; but Sams, of Whole Earth
Foods, never marketed anything containing
sugar.
Jo Fairley recalls: “It was probably the only
time in my life I had money: I’d sold my house in
Fulham.” She bought £20,000 worth of Deberdt’s
chocolate and launched Green & Black’s. “I
wanted something that sounded like an old English
company, like Callard and Bowser or Barker and
Dobson.”
Whole Earth Foods, through their existing
distribution network, were able to deliver the
chocolate to health food shops. Then a Sainsburys
director tried some at a dinner party. Next day, Jo
Fairley had a Sainsburys buyer on the phone, asking
her to submit the chocolate for review, “which we
did and we were in.”
The near-disaster with Sainsburys through the
Togo port blockade took place in August last year.
Seeking new beans suppliers in Belize, Jo found the
growers there had had a bad experience.
An American company had offered $1.75 a pound
for beans in 1987 and encouraged them to plant
hybrid trees for which some borrowed money. When
the company’s buyers returned in 1992 the cocoa
price had fallen and they were offering only 55
cents, too little to cover the growers’ costs. Some
growers lost their land to banks which had lent
them money.
Through the local co-operative, the Toledo Cacao
Growers Association, Jo Fairley offered $1.25 a
pound and a three-year contract, so growers had the
security to go on weeding and picking cocoa.
She started talking to the Fairtrade Foundation
(set up by Cafod, Christian Aid, the National
Federation of Women’s Institutes, Oxfam, Traidcraft
Exchange and the World Development Movement). It
was looking for a product that gives poor overseas
farmers a better deal and so qualifies for its new
symbol. By selling direct to Green & Black’s,
the Maya get a better deal because there are no
middlemen involved.
Fairtrade inspectors who visited Belize then
recommended raising the price to $1.45 a pound, to
encourage even more farmers to come into the
project. Green & Black’s agreed, and got the
Fairtrade mark on January 31. The new Maya Gold
chocolate was on sale on March 2, in time for
Easter.
Green & Black’s now buys from 600 growers in
Togo and expects the Belize total to pass 300. Jo
and Craig went to the Toledo association’s annual
meeting in August. “It was like a fiesta,” she
says.
The
chocolate continues to be made in Bordeaux because
France, unlike Britain, has many small
manufacturers. The recipe uses the minimum of sugar
and the maximum of chocolate, giving the Mayas the
biggest possible order.
The Maya have earned more in six months than
they could formerly earn in a year. Green &
Black’s makes interest-free loans so that they can
be paid as soon as they deliver beans to the
co-operative.
They grow cocoa under the canopy, without
clearing the forest. Jo Fairley is pleased they
have a profitable use for their land which, as a
result, will not be turned over to plantation
agriculture.
She says she became interested in the
environment at school when she came across the
Consumers’ Guide to Saving the Planet. Going
into journalism, however, she led a slightly
schizophrenic life, interested in recycling and
reducing her impact on the planet but writing for
consumer magazines. When the green movement began
to make headlines, she started writing a green
column for The Times. Then she went on
BSkyB’s Go for Green programme, with David
Bellamy.
Jo says her long-term aim in Belize is to help
the Toledo association set up an organisation to
certify produce as organically grown. This would
ease the marketing of other organic products in
Britain and Europe.
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