News

Empty Oceans Before getting into the exciting developments of current cocoa prices, let me tell you about an experience I had with another food source. I was sitting in a very popular seafood restaurant in Toul Svay Prey, a central area of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The restaurant was owned by a Vietnamese family, but…
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We grow cocoa beans in Cambodia and will eventually either create or support a Cambodian bean-to-bar brand. What Cambodia is still lacking—local chocolate brands—has already taken off in many other countries in Asia. Chocolate really is a rising star in Asia, and this is most certainly due to the region’s rapidly growing middle class. The…
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We brought cocoa to Cambodia in 2014. It was the first time in history that cocoa was planted on a commercial base. Many things went wrong. We were inexperienced. Despite the professional help from Mars Sustainable in Vietnam, we were still struggling. And we were threatened by severe droughts in 2015 and almost gave up.…
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It was December 1997. The Asian financial crisis was at its peak. Countries like Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – who previously proudly titled themselves as tiger economies – suddenly plummeted into deep economic despair. In Thailand, the highly influential and respected monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej addressed his Thai people who…
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We called him Sva, which means monkey in the Khmer language. His real name is Peng. His nickname was Sva because he was arrested in the forest when he was roasting and eating a small monkey he had killed with a slingshot. It was a standard way of living for this half Cambodian, half tribal…
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Remember the headlines a while ago about chocolate on track to go extinct in a couple of decennia? As being cocoa farmers ourselves, we did some research and concluded that this would not be the case. We will still eat chocolate, even 100 years from now. However, chocolate might be much more expensive and look…
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We love chickens. Our cocoa trees love chickens. But our termites and other harmful insects hate them. Whenever you want to start with cocoa farming, and you want to do this organically, we strongly recommend you to also buy a bunch of chickens. Free eggs, free chicken meat (if you are not a vegetarian), free…
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we want to give other people who like to start with cocoa an easy access to more knowledge about cocoa; to help them to avoid making the costly mistakes that we made in the beginning, simply because we lacked the most important asset of all: knowledge. How it began We had been driving uphill for…
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