Bean to Bar: The Future of Chocolate
Lucocoa was featured in BBC Radio 4's episode: 'The Secret Life of Chocolate. Part 2: The Future'!
If you didn't catch it, you can still download it from BBCR4's website now. Our Natural Blonde chocolate went down very well with Selasi and Sue and we feel like proud parents!
Lucocoa's main policy has always been to work only with the highest quality, most ethical cocoa producers. This means that we only work with farms that can provide transparency reports; making sure that the farmers are being paid not only a fair wage, but a living wage. We pay up to two thirds higher for our cacao than the Fairtrade minimum because we believe that people who work hard to produce superior quality cacao deserve to be paid accordingly and be able to sustainably keep producing such high quality cacao.
Child labour is still extremely common in the cacao industry and this is something we will never be a part of. When people ask why our chocolate is more expensive than some other mass-produced brands, we encourage people to ask these large companies how their chocolate is so cheap? How much of that 50p you're paying for a bar of chocolate is realistically going back to the farmer who produced the cacao?
Often, people ask if a chocolate brand is organic and fairtrade and the questions stop there. But they mustn't. To eradicate slave labour from the cacao industry, people need to start questioning the ethics and the sustainability of the cacao producers these large chocolate companies get their cacao from.
We make chocolate from bean to bar, so that we know exactly where our cacao has come from, and can control every step of the manufacturing process. This is the only way we could guarantee not only a superior quality chocolate, but an ethical one.
We never have, and never will, use refined sugar or artificial ingredients in our chocolate, instead, we chose to use organic unrefined coconut sugar and the superfood fruit - Lucuma - which comes from Peru and is sometimes called the 'Gold of The Incas' in South America.
We are so happy that people are finally starting to acknowledge small, bean to bar chocolate makers who focus on ethical, sustainable, and fantastic tasting chocolate.
The prequel to the episode which featured Amarachi Clarke, Lucocoa's founder and head chocolate maker, was 'The Secret Life of Chocolate. Part 1: Origins' which is also a fascinating listen if you are interested in chocolate (which we imagine you are since you're reading this!).
Bean to bar really is the future of ethical, great-tasting chocolate and we're so glad we got to have our say on such a huge platform!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qbkb
