Celebrating World Fair Trade Day, our way…

Yesterday, May 10th 2014 was ‘World Fair Trade Day’. It’s great but at Marou Chocolate we believe in fair trade everyday, and yet we are not a certified Fairtrade player. So where do we stand, what does it all mean? We tried to clarify things by answering a few questions from Klervi our French importer.

What is the MAROU concept?

Marou is a bean-to-bar chocolate maker, meaning we make our chocolate from raw materials that are cacao and sugar. We are based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and so we are one of the very few chocolate makers working directly in the country of origin of our cacao, allowing us to work directly with cacao farmers.

How would you define ‘Fairtrade’?

Fairtrade is about farmers getting a good price for the cacao they produce. A good price sounds fairly abstract but in reality it summarizes a number of things: covering costs, making a profit, taking into account market prices (in particular the price a farmer could earn replacing cacao with another crop), the quality of the product and the work and investments necessary for maintaining a high quality production. In Vietnam we are fortunately working in good conditions, meaning that the normal market price farmers will get for fermented cacao beans is very close to the price of cacao delivered in London or New York, that’s already more than double what a West African farmer would typically earn.

At Marou we pay a significant premium over this local market price. The principle behind the premium is that we pay for the right to ‘first choice’, that is we pay more than the other buyers to have access to higher quality cacao before the other buyers.

But our approach to working with the farmers can’t be reduced to simply paying a premium. We believe that being there on a regular basis is just as important, we try to be the main buyer for all our selected farmers, we know them by their names, we know their family: our relationship with them goes beyond just trading.

This is only possible because there are no intermediaries between the farmers and us. Not that intermediaries aren’t sometimes necessary but since we can work directly with Vietnamese farmers it makes sense to do so. This is why we are also members of a great initiative like Direct Cacao.

Practically speaking, how did you find these farmers?

In the beginning it was just us on our motorbikes, looking for cacao farms along the road… Then we hired Mr Hoa, a Vietnamese friend who helped us a lot: scouting new provinces for us, talking to farmers, gathering samples… Now, at least in the provinces where we buy regularly, farmers have heard of us and it’s not uncommon for them to contact us directly.

How do you work with the farmers?

We started by selecting farmers who could do the job well: fermentation and drying are very sensitive steps in the making of good cacao, so we picked farmers who cared about their work and we tried to encourage them in this direction, which goes against the expectations of Vietnamese cocoa farming initiators who tended to be more concerned with quantity than quality.

Typically the farmers call us whenever they have a load of cacao worth picking up: from 300kg to 1t or more, depending on the size and productivity of the farms. We then arrange a visit date and go the farm with our cut test machines. We open each and every bag presented to us (occasionally, farmers will already do a pre-selection of what they consider to be ‘Marou-grade’ cacao) and after having a good smell inside the bag we take a random selection of 50 beans and cut them to check the quality of the fermentation.

Each bag is between 30 and 80 kg and generally corresponds to one fermentation batch. When we’re done with the selection we weigh all the bags that have ‘made the cut’ and we pay the famer directly for the cacao we have selected at a price negotiated between us, which is always at a premium over market price. The bags that we have rejected are usually sold by the farmers at market price to other buyers.

Is this Fairtrade?

I think this goes beyond Fairtrade: at the moment prices of cacao are historically high (50% over the Fairtrade minimum price), so Fairtrade prices are high too but we’re still buying at a 10% premium over Fair Trade price. Moreover ours is a sustainable approach founded on quality. We are making a great chocolate with means of production that are fairly ordinary. Our secret, and it’s not really a secret, is the quality of the cacao we use to make our chocolate. And this quality is produced at the farm, we cultivate it together with the farmers by sending a very clear signal that we always pay more for better quality cacao.

Then why are your chocolate bars not certified Fairtrade?

It’s hard to explain, but I think we have a problem with the whole certification game. Working the way we do it just seems a bit absurd to have to go and pay someone to tell us that we are doing things OK… We understand why it’s there and how it can help in certain instances, especially when you’re dealing with huge buyers that wield enormous power compared with the farmers, but we don’t recognise ourselves in this scenario: we’re not really that much bigger than our farmers, and we definitely feel more comfortable outside this system. I hope our customers trust us that we do as we say and really everybody’s welcome to check for themselves.

Do you advise the farmers on their working techniques?

Yes, as far as we can. But our capacity to help feels sometimes a bit limited. We can tell them whether we are satisfied with their results or not, but giving more precise advice really depends on controlling their whole process. It’s pretty hard, although having built and running our own fermentation station since last year has definitely helped us understand things better from a technical point of view. Going from farm to farm and in different provinces we are also in a great position to help spread ‘best practices’.

What about the farmers’ working conditions?

Regarding working conditions we are in a very comfortable position in Vietnam: the work is still hard out in the fields but there is no such thing as forced labour here. All of the farmers we work with are literate and they definitely know how to count too! These farmers make a decent living and for the most part their children are getting a university education, so we’re very far away from the situations of extreme poverty you often read about in relation to cacao farming in places like Africa, some South American countries or Haiti. In fact our number one issue in the years to come is to make sure someone will take over the farms when the generation of farmers we currently work with is going to retire. With our youngest farmer in his 40s and many of them pushing 65 it’s a very real concern. So it’s in our best interest to make sure that running a successful cacao farm is going to be as good an option as a job in the city for the next generation.

A final word for chocolate lovers?

Whatever chocolate you like, try and understand where it comes from, how it was made. The world of chocolate is going through very interesting times right now: the bean-to-bar movement is challenging industrial producers and for the first time chocolate lovers are finding themselves with a real choice of cacao origin, transformation processes, tastes, texture, it’s like the Cambrian explosion of chocolate out there! Go and talk to chocolate makers, the real ones just can’t shut up about their cacao…