Cargill connects cocoa and chocolate customers via CocoaWise portal
To connect consumers with the journey of the cocoa they are eating and drinking, Cargill has launched CocoaWise, a digital portal for food and beverage manufacturers to increase their knowledge and share the origin of the products they source from Cargill’s direct supply chain.
Harold Poelma, president of Cargill’s cocoa & chocolate business said: “With cutting-edge technologies, like CocoaWise, we are able to strengthen this collaboration and move the industry forward together towards a more transparent and sustainable cocoa supply chain benefiting both farmers and customers.”
CocoaWise provides customers with fast, easy access to the sustainability data of Cargill’s cocoa supply chain. With full, real-time visibility, CocoaWise enables customers to be more deeply connected to the communities from which they purchase their cocoa and see first-hand the impact of financial investments in key initiatives that meet the needs of the cocoa farming communities on the ground, such as providing sustainable agriculture coaching for farmers, entrepreneurship trainings for women and nutritional programs for families.
CocoaWise pulls information from a centralised data platform, CocoaWise 360, which is fed from a suite of Cargill’s digital tools that are designed to increase transparency and traceability while enhancing cocoa farming practices and community well-being. Two of these in Supply chain transparency include:
- CocoaWise Map – An interactive map that shows the name and location of the 128 cooperative offices in Côte d’Ivoire, the 7 buying stations in Ghana and the 11 buying stations in Cameroon belonging to our direct sourcing network in these countries.
- CocoaWise BeanTracker – Cocoa cooperatives physically tracking the cocoa beans they manage back to the individual farm via cocoa bag barcodes to prevent beans from deforested areas to enter our supply chain as well as to help them make better data-driven business decisions.
Other tools exist in financial transparency, and impact transparency, the latter covering farm data, professionalism and insight for cocoa sustainability goals.
“For years, we have been putting technology to work to help the 210,000 farmers in the five countries we purchase our cocoa. This crop year alone, we invested an additional USD $3 million in traceability initiatives that allowed us to bring the data from our supply chain together in more powerful ways and help farmers enhance agricultural practices,” said Taco Terheijden, sustainability director for Cargill’s cocoa & chocolate business. “If we want to make sure farmers have a bright future growing sustainable cocoa, we need to make sure consumers believe in it.”