Carodenuto — along with Janina Grabs, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich’s Environmental Policy Lab — wants to know how, and if, these businesses can drive widespread change to sustainable farming.
Each year, the world consumes about four million tonnes of cocoa, most of it grown by small farmers in West Africa. The beans then pass between middlemen along increasingly concentrated supply chains. By the time they reach supermarket shelves, over 60 per cent of the beans will have been controlled by three international commodity companies, she said.
That creates an “hourglass” structure, she said. There are lots of farmers at one end and plenty of chocolate consumers at the other, but they’re only linked by a few large companies. It’s a structure replicated across most commodity supply chains, from coffee to corn.