Indonesia’s chocolate dream: sustainable cocoa farming
- Asia’s biggest producer of cocoa beans is looking to diversify and make more top-quality beans
- But a decline in crop quantity and quality threatens the industry
Tissa Aunilla recalls the day she brought a sample of her company’s chocolate to a group of farmers who grew the cocoa beans it was made from on the Indonesian island of Bali.
“When they tasted it, they started to cry,” said lawyer-turned-chocolatier Aunilla. Though the farmers had grown cocoa for years, they had never eaten the product made from their beans.
The farmers in Tabenan, Bali, now set aside 80 per cent of their output for the single origin Bali bar made by Pipiltin, the Jakarta-based company Aunilla founded in 2013 to produce premium chocolate from Indonesia-grown beans.
Aunilla switched from corporate law to chocolate making after she discovered her favourite European brand sourced its beans from Java. Although Indonesia has been one of the world’s top producers of cocoa beans for years, almost all of it gets exported to be processed into chocolate abroad.
Aunilla felt Indonesia could be a producer of high-quality chocolate as well, and saw potential in its domestic market of 264 million consumers.
Krakakoa, founded in 2013, produces two tons of organic “farm-to-bar” chocolate a month, for sale across the archipelago, in Singapore and the EU.