Dear Somapals,

Some of you will have seen this week’s Four Corners report about cacao farming in Ghana (if you haven’t, you can watch it here). Many of you have emailed us about it, expressing a mixture of disbelief, sadness, and exasperation that we sincerely share.

More than half the world’s cacao comes from the Ivory Coast and Ghana. The average cacao farmer in those countries earns less than US$1 each day. They sell cacao to agents working for state-licensed buying agencies, who pass it on to the government (in countries rife with corruption), who sell in bulk to giant industrial chocolate-makers.

If you pay $8 for a block of Cadbury Dairy Milk ‘Chocolate’ (we use the term loosely, as only 27% of your block of Cadbury is actually cacao, while 56% is sugar), about 70c makes its way to cacao farmers. Meanwhile, about $1.30* goes to the shareholders of Mondelez (which owns Cadbury), and a whole lot more to corporate salaries and bonuses, buyers’ agents, middle-men, and government pay-offs.

*Mondelez reported a 16.6% profit margin after tax last quarter.

The abuses we hear about in the West African cacao industry are flow-on effects from farmers being paid poorly. Because they cannot afford staff, many farmers turn to child or even slave labour. Many farmers illegally fell wild forest to plant their trees in more fertile soil (Ghana has lost 80% of its virgin forest in the last 60 years; the Ivory Coast has lost 90%). Poor farmers do not have the money to innovate on their farms, so yields are low, quality is poor, and diseases run rampant. In fact, when the cacao commodity price rose in 2023, after having been flat for fifty years, it was because of diseases spreading uncontrollably through unhealthy crops.

The solutions proposed by large chocolate companies are more cover-ups than solutions. Fairness and sustainability certifications have frighteningly low standards, which are often contravened (most large chocolate companies do a thing called ‘mass balance,’ where they mix certified beans with non-certified beans, and promise to keep a tally of how much they’ve used of each). Meanwhile, the Rainforest Alliance made more than US$100,000,000 last year.

The most recent solution proposed by big chocolate companies has been replacing traditional cacao with lab-grown cacao, which is either cacao grown artificially in labs, or cacao-like substances made from soy beans or sunflower seeds. In both cases, their goal is to source cacao at even cheaper prices than they do now, while farmers in West Africa, who currently earn next to nothing, will actually earn nothing, or at best sell their beans at steep discounts to the few remaining chocolate-makers who actually use real cacao.

Hopefully it’s clear to you by now, as it is to us, that the solution to these problems is not going to come from a boardroom. But we do think there is a solution, and we think that solution involves us, and you.

We didn’t start Soma to change the world; we started Soma because we wanted a decent cup of cacao. As Soma has grown, and we have sourced more cacaos, we have been offered many cheap options with questionable ethics. Several times, especially when our company was young and not making money, those options were very tempting. But we could never bring ourselves to take them. At Soma, there are only three shareholders - Alistair, Rose, and Snowbell - who all sleep in one bed (actually, we all sleep on Alistair’s side of one bed), so we are very clear that we will never make any choice that compromises the quality of our sleep.

Currently, we source Daintree Cacao from Farmer John Goodman and his family, plus the backpackers he hires as seasonal staff. We source our Mexican Cacao from Farmer Josué María Pascuales Muñoz and his family, plus the families who work with him. We source our Peruvian Cacao from an indigenous collective who won the Equator Prize from the United Nations Development Programme in 2019. We source our Ecuadorian Cacao from a collective of small independent farmers in the Napo Valley. We source our Solomon Islands Cacao from collective of small farmers on Guadalcanal, facilitated by our friends at Solomons Gold. And we source of Karkar Island Cacao from Farmer Paul Goodyear, who employs 500 men and women from his local community.

Until now, we haven’t sold any African cacao, but we have been moved and inspired by the work we do with partners in the Pacific Islands. Sometimes in Australia we forget how disadvantaged our neighbours are. The GDP per capita in Ghana is US$3257 per year, while in PNG it is $3000, and the Solomon Islands less than $2000. There is so much good we can do a couple of hours from home.

When we visited Karkar Island last year, Farmer Paul showed us all the things the money we spend with him has done. He explained that since commodity prices rose, and we started buying from him, he sees more children in school each morning, more solar panels on roofs, and more bicycles on the roads. Karkar Island is an island of 100,000 people without a single doctor. Paul and his wife Barbara personally buy medicines to distribute at their cacao processing centre.

Soma affiliate Bono (from U2) said that “aid is just a stop-gap… commerce and entrepreneurship take more people out of poverty than aid.” It has excited us to see collectives of cacao farmers popping up across West Africa in the last few years, generally organised by a cacao industry professional who invests in the infrastructure and education for farmers to grow the kind of organic, healthy, premium cacao that we might buy at Soma. Our friends at Solomons Gold did a similar thing in Guadalcanal. Occasionally we think about upping sticks ourselves and doing the same on some Soma paradise we can fall in love with, but Snowbell vetoes the vote, and for now our role is at home.

Our role, in fact, is connecting you - people who care about the quality of their cacao, and the quality of life of the people who grew it - with amazing cacao farmers doing amazing things around the world. Everything, ultimately, starts with you - it is your money that ends up in a solar panel on the roof of a house in Papua New Guinea, or in drinking water filters in Ecuador, or in better education for indigenous children in Peru. It is also your money, if you choose, that ends up with the shareholders of Mondelez. We are fortunate to live in this lucky country; the fortune we have is not a burden to be ashamed of, but an opportunity to make the world better, for us and all our brothers and sisters.

The Four Corners story (which we watched this morning) ended on gloomy note, but that’s just journalism. The real story is just beginning, and it’s beginning with us. Every day we are offered a thousand chances to make the world better. Those chances need not be sacrifices - they can be as delightful as buying better chocolate (or cacao). The world won’t be saved by gloom, and it certainly won’t be saved by greed; it will be saved by people who care. It is our privilege to be those people.

With Pacific Islands coconut sugar and sea salt,

Rose, Alistair, and the team at Soma Cacao