Today, we visited Sibö, a chocolate producer, and Riverside, a sustainable restaurant. As it turns out, coffee and chocate undergo a very similar process in production. When growing, they both require a special environment. Just as coffee needs areas like Costa Rica with constant moisture, cocoa cannot be grown in European areas and must instead be imported from continents like the Americas. Once grown, both coffee and cacao need to have their shells removed and their coffee beans/cacao nips removed. These beans and nips are then fermented, sun-dried, and roasted for further use. Throughout this process, waste for both products is recycled to increase the sustainability of production. Both coffee parchment skins and cacao nip skins are used to make paper, and other byproducts like coffee wood and cocoa butter can be recycled for other uses (fuel and cosmetics). Market competition for both coffee and chocolate revolves around quality and quantity; because Costa Rica is a small country and has much less land than other producers, Costa Rican coffee and chocolate boasts of high quality. As a result, both of these products are very popular exports in Costa Rica. 

However, chocolate production has some challenges of its own. When nips dry in the sun, time plays a significant role in the final chocolate flavor. If dried too quickly, the nips absorb the vinegar from fermentation and become bitter. If dried to slowly, the nips will mold. To maintain an ideal drying speed, producers like Sibö use fans to circulate air in the drying area. Another challenge shows in grinding the nips, as under-grinding will make the chocolate course and bitter. In addition, using fresh milk makes milk chocolate go bad quickly (the best solution is to use powdered milk, as discovered by Nestle). In the supply chain, the cost of cacao is a large challenge. While growing cacao is good for the environment, farmers make very little money from it and thus have very little motivation to continue growing cacao. To ensure the continued supply of cacao, coffee producers pay higher prices to farmers. However, supermarket prices for the finished chocolate tend to remain constant, reducing unit profit. This balance of prices, costs, and revenues challenges coffee producers, as they are responsible for both encouraging cacao supply and making profit.

The producers we have visited this week have many similar priorities. In addition to producing some of Costa Rica’s largest exports, they have large commitments to sustainability. While Sibö chocolate reuses cocoa shells in their paper packaging, Doka coffee and Café Britt reuse coffee skins and coffee wood as fuel. Similarly, the waste from the sustainable restaurant Riverside is used as compost to grow more ingredients (this restaurant was also built from the remains of the restaurant before it). This sustainability plays a large role in their marketing; Sibö and Café Britt both advertise their products to protect cacao plants and donate to animal conservation, and Riverside is well-known for for growing most of their ingredients (an image of one of their meals is shown to the right).

Otra vez, un haiku para ustedes:

Sustainable food,

Coffee, chocolate…

And oh, so yummy.