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region produces fruits of different shapes, sizes, and textures,
with colors ranging from dark brown to bright pink to acid green.
The cocoa beans—also known as cacao—that will become choc-
olate, each roughly the size of a quarter, are packed inside the
colorful shells, surrounded by a delicious creamy white pulp. It
tastes intensely fruity, sweet, and tropical—nothing at all like
chocolate as we know it.
The global chocolate industry is worth more than $100 bil-
lion, but most cocoa farmers around the world are poor. “Co-
coa farmers are underpaid for the work they do,” says Greg
D’Alesandre, a buyer for San Francisco’s Dandelion Chocolate,
an uncompromising producer of single-origin bars, including
from Tanzania. Global cocoa prices today are lower than they
were 40 years ago, and many younger farmers are avoiding the
crop altogether. But in Mbingu, a small cocoa-processing com-
pany called Kokoa Kamili shows a new model can work better
for farmers and lead to better-tasting chocolate.
Founders Simran Bindra and Brian LoBue have identified a
weak link in the local chocolate supply chain: Growers here have
long been at the mercy of njemke, local middlemen, who pass
through the farms at unpredictable intervals, use unregulated
scales to weigh the beans, and pay as little as possible for the crop.
Njemke won’t buy fresh, perishable cocoa, so farmers must fer-
ment and dry their beans themselves. Big commodity traders pay
njemke for quantity alone, so farmers are happy to sell them un-
ripe or rotten beans along with the rest.
This system keeps prices of cocoa beans low in this part of the
world, but there are steep costs at both ends of the supply chain:
Growers are poorly paid for their work, and the chocolate that re-
sults will never live up to its f lavor and quality potential. “When
you have inconsistent and uncontrolled fermentation and dry-
ing, you’re going to get a lot of beans that are overfermented and
underfermented,” explains William Mullen, a spokesman for
Brooklyn, New York–based Raaka Chocolate. “You end up with
some really bad moldy, cheesy, overly astringent f lavors.”
Bindra and LoBue work outside the njemke system. They buy
wet cocoa from farmers and process it themselves. “Sixty to 70
percent of the f lavor development of a bean comes in the fermen-
tation and drying,” Bindra says. “That was something we thought
we could figure out how to do.” They both have lived in Tanzania
for years, where they met as colleagues at an international non-
profit. LoBue grew up in California on his family’s citrus farm,
which gave him a visceral understanding of the relationship be-
tween farmers, processors, and middlemen. Bindra, who grew
up in Hong Kong, was working with Tanzania’s coffee industry
when he was struck by the improvement in quality that central-
ized processing had made. The two found themselves chatting
about cocoa together after work while waiting for the Dar es Sa-
laam rush hour to subside. It wasn’t long before they decided to
break out of the nonprofit world together. “Who are we to come
in and say you need x, y, and z?” Bindra asks. “We wanted to pay
people fairly for what they do, pay people better than anyone else
does, and let them decide what to use their money for.”
What makes Kokoa Kamili’s model possible is demand from
the burgeoning craft-chocolate industry, sometimes called bean-
to-bar chocolate, an ecosystem of small companies that will pay
a premium for exceptional cocoa beans from a specific location.
This allows growers to sell higher-quality cocoa beans at higher
prices, which means better pay for their farmers.
Kokoa Kamili was founded in 2013. Today, it works with
around 4,000 growers in and around Mbingu. “When we
started, farmers in the Kilombero Valley received the lowest
price for cocoa in Tanzania,” Bindra says. “But every year since,
we’ve paid the highest price of anyone buying.”
For growers like Maglass, this has made a world of difference.
Six years ago, she was ready to give up on cocoa, and was on the