Following last week’s announcement that pioneer organic and Fairtrade chocolate brand Green & Black’s has launched a non-organic range (and is leaving the Fairtrade scheme for its owner’s Cocoa Life initiative), the company’s co-founder Craig Sams talks here about a development that is already dividing opinion in the natural and organic community.
Natural Products Global: What do you understand to be thinking behind the Green & Black’s Velvet Edition launch?
Craig Sams: The Cocoa Life programme in Ghana has been very successful in achieving its goals. They farmers are now producing high quality cacao, enjoying a big uplift in income, kids are going to school, women are running the programme, which is validated by FLOCert (Fairtrade Labelling Organisations Certification) and Mondelez are working with the Ghana government to guarantee zero deforestation. It’s a good story and, four years on, it’s one that they can tell and will tell. This high-quality cacao is going into Dairy Milk but it also works very well in 70% chocolate. This premium market belonged to Green & Black’s until 1995, when Lindt came in and now Lindt outsells Green & Black’s. Mondelez tried to launch the Cote d’Or brand in the UK around 2007 and it failed to take sales from Lindt or from Green & Black’s. They don’t have another premium brand suitable for premium dark chocolate, so the obvious choice is to launch a parallel range of premium chocolate to the existing Green & Black’s range and build on its existing market presence.
NPG: Do you think, in part, this development is to do with ‘premium’ failing to marry with organic in some consumers’ minds?
CS: People who bought Green & Black’s thought organic and Fairtrade were nice, but it was the flavour and price that counts most. When Lindt did a price promotion their sales went up and G&B’s went down. When G&B’s did a price promotion their sales went up and Lindt sales went down. So there is quite a big overlap in premium, with flavour and price being more important to many people than provenance. Organic chocolate outperforms the organic market overall (along with milk, yoghurt, baby food, carrots).
NPG: What are your own feelings about Green & Black’s – emphatically organic from the outset – launching an extensive non-organic range, and are you confident that Cadbury/Mondelez remain committed to organic over the longer term?
CS: Jo (Fairley, Green & Black’s co-founder) and I are personally very proud that we disrupted the entire cocoa model with Green & Black’s and showed there was a better way to work with cocoa farmers. When we started out the industry was wedded to big industrial plantations as the hub through which small farmers would sell their cacao. It was a crappy model and a lot of money and energy was wasted on it. Malaysia planted over 400,000 hectares on this misguided principle and now they are down to just 17,000. We saw it was a flop and designed an alternative.
In 2001, when Cadbury helped us to help the farmers in Belize to recover from the damage caused by Hurricane Iris, their technical director, Tony Lass, saw our relationship model in operation and came back to the UK and Cadbury set up their Cadbury Cocoa Partnership with a £40 million budget, based on the same model we had created with the Maya farmers in Belize. But it was not organic. When Mondelez took over Cadbury they renamed the Cocoa Partnership the Cocoa Life Foundation and endowed it with $400 million. We had pioneered a new way of working with smallholder farmers: guaranteed long term relationship; guaranteed price levels with upward only revision; biodiversity protection; gender and child labour protection and support for economic diversification and tree planting. All of that is in the Cocoa Life programme, but with money and power behind it. There are real challenges to growing organic cacao in Ghana, but Mondelez are working on it. The Cocoa Life programme is being rolled out to the Dominican Republic, where most organic cacao does come from and it will enhance the situation there for the farmers who grow cacao for the organic part of the Green & Black’s range.
Nobody jumps on me because Whole Earth Foods sells a lot of non-organic peanut butter. Nobody jumps on Montezuma because some of its chocolate is organic and some of it isn’t. Nobody jumps on Heinz because they sell organic and non-organic ketchup.
“Nobody jumps on me because Whole Earth Foods sells a lot of non-organic peanut butter. Nobody jumps on Montezuma because some of its chocolate is organic and some of it isn’t. Nobody jumps on Heinz because they sell organic and non-organic ketchup”
It’s a fact that price trumps organic for the majority of consumers. Green & Black’s stands for ethically produced and delicious chocolate. I’m betting that the sales of the organic range will rise on the back of the increased distribution and awareness that the Velvet launch will bring in its wake. We’ll see.
Green & Black’s organic range is a £100 million plus global brand. I don’t think there is any question of that being dropped in the longer term.
Mar 24, 2023