This article was written by Gillian Goddard. Gillian grew up in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad at a time when many local cacao plantations had been abandoned. After studying at Stanford University, she returned to Trinidad and became a community organizer and social entrepreneur focused on circular economy and regenerative farming as ways to elevate rural communities. Goddard developed a cooperative network of small chocolate entrepreneurs sharing skills and working together. That network has spread to 11 nations on multiple continents. This article is an edited version of a talk Gillian gave at a Bioneers Conference. [Note: The cacao plant produces a seed or bean that is processed into cocoa which is the main ingredient in chocolate. However, sometimes cacao and cocoa are used interchangeably.]

The Spanish were the first European colonizers in Trinidad. Under their colonial system, it was illegal to make furniture. Trinidad had to send the wood to Spain where the furniture was made and then shipped back to the Caribbean. For the most part, that model is used today for chocolate in most cacao growing countries. About 75% of cacao is grown by black hands, which means Africans or descendants of Africans, but only 5% of Black people are involved in value-added cocoa production. That’s what colonization looks like.

Colonies were not really encouraged, incentivized or allowed to do anything with their product. That is how Europe got rich. I always tell people I don’t need reparations. Just give me the difference between the price of cacao beans and the price of chocolate that has been produced for 300 years in Switzerland, and I will be satisfied with that.

Decolonizing Chocolate

So in 2014, I co-founded the Alliance of Rural Communities (ARC) that operates in the Caribbean, mainly in Trinidad, but also in Tobago, St. Lucia, and Guyana. ARC supports communities to develop collective chocolate production facilities in their regions so they can earn a much higher income than exporting the raw material, the cocoa beans.

At the time, I had an organic shop and all the cocoa was imported. I asked myself why in a region where cacao beans are grown are we importing cocoa? I, like almost everyone else in Trinidad, had never tasted local chocolate. It would be like an American never having eaten apple pie.

So my partner and I started making chocolate in our rented home. We had a small machine in the bedroom. It was the only room with air conditioning. Within a month we called some friends in a cacao growing village and said to send four young adults to our house to help and learn how to make chocolate.

I say this because people have the idea that there’s some lofty state you have to be in to make major change. But that’s actually when you don’t make change. When people see what I do, they often copy it because it looks so accessible. If you have a grandiose plan that needs hundreds of thousands of dollars, that looks unreachable. Regular people won’t do that. So we started training people from different local communities, and eventually those people started their own small chocolate enterprises.

We realized that you can transfer skills, but if people don’t have a car, if they don’t know anybody in the big stores, if they have the wrong accent, nobody is going to put their chocolates on the shelf. So skills transfer is often useless if you don’t have all those other things. So we now have a car, we have a delivery person, they pick up from the community enterprises, we buy spare parts together, we buy labels together. We do most things together.

It’s kind of a franchise model. Nature does franchises. A forest is a forest is a forest. It has regional variations but there’s a basic framework. Nature is very efficient and replicates things. So, we copy nature as much as we can, and we gradually grew a network.

We started a small marketplace and small innovation centers in the communities. What that looks like is individual chocolate mini-enterprises, a marketplace community, and craft companies. Most Caribbean countries import 90% of their food and drink, but we have a hundred percent local food catering operation. We did about 156 events last year.

We also started a conservation NGO because we wanted to be accountable. It was not some outside enterprise, it’s us local folks. We also have ARC destinations for conservation tourism. With all of this, we have a diversified system. But during COVID the tourism fell to zero because Trinidad closed our borders for two years. Sales for the community chocolate companies dropped. But the marketplace jumped up, and filled the space. That’s why you have to have diversity in a system, just as nature does.

The Network Expands to Africa

During COVID, I went on Instagram to find out who’s growing cacao outside of Trinidad. I reached out to a woman in Malawi who had expressed interest in learning how to make chocolate. And then somebody from Uganda sent me a WhatsApp message saying that a person from Trinidad told him to get in touch with me to learn how to make chocolate. Those were the first two people. Two weeks later, we had people from 14 countries on the phone and a Pan-African movement of chocolate began within two weeks. In October I said, “Let’s do a Christmas box.” We had to send machines to most people, teach them on Zoom how to make chocolate, package the product, create branding and get it to the US.

On Christmas Eve, we sent out 200 boxes with 12 chocolates each from a different country. It was pretty exciting. For the American bar, we mixed all the other bars together and called it the Melting Pot Bar. 

That was an amazing example of how, with almost no money, we could make something like that happen. That network of cooperation is now called The Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective and is similar to the model of the ARC network. We now have a producer hive, which includes Global North countries that don’t grow cacao. They are setting up cafes and a wholesale network.

Sharing the Culture of Chocolate

Cacao is a crop native to the tropical regions of the American hemisphere that is now grown mainly in Africa. Part of our goal, as people from the place of the origins of cacao, was to ally with Africans and share the culture and process of chocolate making. One of my father’s early memories is grating a hard stick of cocoa and some spices into milk and dipping cassava bread into it, and that was a full meal. Some variation of that drink has been enjoyed for 5000 years by the people of the native cacao growing regions.

In the first classes we did in the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective, it was very clear that not a smidgen of culture had been transferred with the crop.

Many Africans did not know that cocoa turned into chocolate. The people in our network said they had begged commodity traders and chocolate makers who were visiting them to show them some of the process and were repeatedly refused. There was no sharing going on. So we are attempting to do that to make a gesture of connection.

We are creating a model based on the idea that I am going to give you what I have no matter the consequences to me. That is what I call ethics and what I call bravery.

The Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective is a network of cooperatives. Ghana has an 806-women cooperative. Cameroon has 2000 people in cooperatives who work together. Côte d’Ivoire has a 310-person cooperative. St. Lucia has a women’s collective. The other people involved are generally entrepreneurial individuals of African heritage. We are sharing information and teaching each other. The Chocolate Hive in the US is made up of a group in East Cleveland, a group in Memphis and a group in Chicago. We have a few other places that we’ve started to work with as well.

The goal was to have African-Americans, especially in legacy African-American communities who were not traditionally engaged in the chocolate world, benefit economically by participating in this network.

Hopefully each one will end up with a cafe selling the products and also selling products from their own community following the model that we have in Trinidad. We have branded Cross Atlantic as Chocolate Rebellion and now we are seen as experts because many skill-sharing projects have failed. They don’t usually work for any length of time.

We want to also control distribution transportation. In our experience with ARC, using people who think differently about the world has not worked for us. So, we are building a 300 ton sailboat to move our products around the Atlantic. We’ve tested it by sending cacao beans to Cornwall, England, and chocolate and cocoa butter to Barbados. We are now developing the markets so we can fill the boats.

We did an event in three African countries in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana; three Caribbean countries: St. Lucia, St. Kit, San Neeva, Trinidad; Columbia; two places in the US: Memphis, East Cleveland; and in Paris, London and Copenhagen. So what we want to do is make sure we have enough product that by the time we build the boat, we can fill it.

A Cultural Movement Using Nature as a Model

I consider this a cultural movement because it’s the culture that has been stolen from us, not just the cargo. And when I say us, I mean regular people who are not big shipping magnates who are billionaires sending stuff all over the world. We are working with a Brazilian woman and a Canadian guy who are doing decarbonized shipping. We are working with two Danish master students who are doing route optimization, a marine architect in the Caribbean, and others.

There are still gaps that have to be addressed, but it was only ten years ago that we started in the Caribbean with ARC and only three years ago in Africa with the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective. Currently there are thousands of people involved. I would say the maximum amount of money that has been spent to train all these people and get equipment is not even $70,000.

It’s amazing how much you can do with a little, if you create a model that imitates the efficiencies of the natural world. We do it by moving away from commodity-scale and monoculture thinking to a polyculture way of thinking. By mimicking a forest, we build redundancy  and diversity into the model, and into the funding.  We are creating relationships between people as we shift and dodge and move the same way the natural world moves.