When Gillian Goddard was at primary school just outside Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, cocoa pods were on sale in the tuck shop for 5 cents each, the pulpy bits around the bean sucked out as a fruit snack. She didn’t buy them, however. “Why pay the money when you could walk up the hill to an abandoned plantation and pick them yourself?” she asked me. “They were just falling onto the ground there, untended.”
It took a few more decades for Goddard to return to these early days of casual harvesting of cocoa and, when she did, it certainly wasn’t to eat the pulpy fruity part. In fact, it wasn’t even anything to do with cocoa for its own sake. “I don’t actually like chocolate,” she threw out untruthfully during an international conference dedicated to craft chocolate, in frustration at the overemphasis on the quality of the product versus the well-being of the people. But despite this personal ambivalence to the globally successful commodity, Goddard has been part of a new movement, changing how chocolate is produced, not only in Trinidad but around the world. From 17th-century York, England, to the plantations of East Africa to Trinidad, this tiny bean from a lacy flower has transformed societies — and continues to do so today.
I live in York, a city famous for chocolate. Since the 17th century, it has been home to a large population of Quakers, who believed alcohol underpinned many of society’s problems and promoted sugary treats and drinks as an alternative. Famous chocolate brands, including Rowntree’s and Terry’s, were founded by York families, who began making sweets in the 18th and 19th centuries. One factory is still there and, on good days with a gentle wind blowing the right way, the scent of chocolate wafts into the city. It used to belong to Rowntree’s, before it was taken over by Nestle. Various members of my family worked there during university holidays. (My father notoriously couldn’t eat another KitKat for 20 years after his summer of unlimited supply; my aunt still can’t face an After Eight, more than five decades on. She can’t even stand the smell. “If we get given a box, your uncle has to eat them in the garden,” she told me over Christmas.)
Despite the Quakers’ anti-slavery stance, the chocolate they were producing was still heavily reliant on the labor of enslaved people, from the cocoa and sugar plantations to the transportation of the ingredients across the globe. But the legacy of this system goes far beyond profiting directly from slavery. To this day, the systems put in place to transport beans to factories in York and many other cities continue to keep cocoa farmers impoverished while creating profits for Western sweets manufacturers.
“I think about this in terms of a reservoir,” Goddard tells me. “I feel that’s how money is being hoarded in the Global North.” This “reservoir” of money is fed by rivers or tributaries from all over the world, with all countries, rich and poor, contributing to the wealth of the West through their labor and products. “This hoarding isn’t happening where the water is being produced,” Goddard continues, “it’s being diverted to this reservoir elsewhere. And it makes sense to try and get access to some of that water.” There are many ways to try and do that. “You can redirect the water before it gets to the reservoir. You can go there and develop relationships with the people who own the reservoir. Or you can meet those taking the water out and make a relationship with them.”
The cocoa plantation up the hill from Goddard’s school wasn’t the only place where cocoa trees dropped their pods to the ground, unharvested. Trinidad and Tobago’s economy is largely based on oil and gas, enriching the small islands but distorting other sectors. It has become harder and harder to make money farming, meaning many old estates lie abandoned, their grand colonial houses falling into disrepair. “It’s a working-class gig now,” Goddard tells me. Under an earlier, colonial-era law, cocoa beans could only be sold through the government, limiting any possibility for negotiating prices. This changed around the time Goddard started her venture in 2015, giving her and the cocoa farmers of Trinidad an opportunity to sell their harvests themselves.
Goddard began collecting meticulous data; she showed me the bewildering table. “This harvest here,” she said, highlighting a cell of the spreadsheet, “could be sold as beans, for $2,000.” But if they made it into chocolate, she calculated, they could sell the same harvest for $12,000, though a lot of work was needed to get to that price. There were other ingredients and possibly machinery to buy, packaging to design and pay for and distribution and sales to figure out. But it was clear there was greater revenue to be had if the work was done. “The more value you add to the cocoa beans, the more money stays in the community,” Kelly Fitzjames, assistant director of the Alliance of Rural Communities (ARC), summarized. Adding value to the product at home in Trinidad was the first way Goddard found to stem the flow of water to the reservoir.
Indigenous communities had a far longer relationship with the plant, and “dancing the cocoa” — when farmers dance and stamp on the harvested beans — is an important part of not only processing the beans but also of Trinidad’s culture, where a common phrase is “cocoa is king.” Leila Capildeo remembers visiting the cocoa estate where her father grew up and seeing the long house where the cocoa was stored, with an internal ceiling that could be pulled out like a massive drawer in order to dry the beans in the sun. The stories from her father included the ritual of dancing the cocoa as part of this drying process, to ensure air gets through and the beans dry evenly.
Goddard studied these traditional practices as well as YouTube videos and experimented and spread the word. Cocoa farmers were soon producing Trinidadian chocolate, though this was not the ultimate goal for Goddard. Rather, chocolate was one of her tools for the wider aim of building cooperatives. Cocoa was useful because it was a crop that didn’t easily spoil and could be easily transported, so it became a plank of the cooperatives — but just one, among many, guided by Goddard’s land-based approach.
Her model for her organization, ARC, was businesses as ecosystems. “Forests move resources around, through water, fungi, creatures and so on, and really that’s all businesses are doing, moving resources around,” she said. Diversity, she continued, means resilience in both forest and business, a particular characteristic of lush Trinidad, home to a range of ecosystems — including rainforest, woodland, swamp forests, marshes and savannahs — despite its small size. (At around 1,840 square miles, it is slightly smaller than Delaware.) These different landscapes support approximately 420 bird species and 85 reptile species as well as rare plants and migratory birds.
Feedback loops are also important in ecosystems, and so the cooperatives began expanding. Soon, locals were leading tours of their areas, setting up cafes and shops for their goods, distributing vegetable boxes and, of course, selling chocolate, wholesale and retail, on top of their farming activities.
This approach stood them in good stead during the COVID-19 pandemic, when certain aspects of the business, such as tourism, collapsed completely, though deliveries of vegetable boxes shot up. The strict lockdown provided another opportunity that was to prove transformative for global chocolate production.
Like the rest of us, Goddard had learned to use Zoom to communicate during the pandemic and thought it could be used to teach yet more cocoa farmers about adding value to their harvests — and not just in Trinidad. A friend had moved to Uganda and found a brother and sister who were interested; a Canadian filmmaker was just back from filming a women’s cocoa cooperative in Ghana and passed on their details. The word went out and soon there were interested farmers from Nigeria, Jamaica, Cameroon and also diaspora chocolate makers in America and the United Kingdom. This was the birth of the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Cooperative, or CACC, now called Chocolate Rebellion. In 2021, they brought out a box of 12 chocolate mini-bars: 11 were from 11 different cocoa-producing countries, while the 12th was a so-called “melting pot,” produced in the United States using beans grown across Africa.
The Ghanaian representative, Leticia Yankey, had also stumbled into cocoa farming but in a very different way from Goddard, though perhaps motivated by a similar sense of fighting for social justice. Yankey was volunteering with HIV-positive and AIDS patients, many of whom were abandoned by their families when diagnosed. “There was no psychosocial support back then for these people,” she told me. “So I took it on myself, visiting them in their homes, counseling them, being there.” One man reacted very badly to the antiretroviral drugs she managed to get him on, falling into a coma. Yankey stayed with him in hospital for four weeks, during which he woke up and told her he needed to see her regularly for the rest of his life, and would get her a cocoa farm in his community to make that happen. She laughed, thinking it was a joke. “I told him I don’t even have an idea about cocoa farming, let alone the land!” But the man was insistent and told her he wouldn’t take his medicine if she refused. “Honestly, I said yes to please him, so he’d stay alive.” When his health improved, he arranged a meeting with a man who offered her land on credit and she eventually did plant cocoa, feeding the soil with sawdust and chicken droppings, “doing things the organic way.”
Within a year, her cocoa plants blossomed and she was hooked. “We describe it in Ghana as the golden tree,” Yankey said, “as it’s the backbone of our economy.” (Ghana is the second-highest producer of cocoa beans in the world, after the Ivory Coast.) Yankey also planted tomato, cassava and plantain, and got some chickens. “It wasn’t a plan, or even a choice,” she told me. “But every day I was yearning to visit my farm. Within three years, I had cocoa beans and had paid off the loan.”
She researched and experimented with her cocoa farm and noticed that “women do almost all the work on cocoa production,” she said. “Men clear the land but women do the planting, weeding, harvesting, they fetch water, spray the pesticide. Men only dry for the first day, then the women take over. Women carry it all to be sold — then men collect the money.” When she began to gain recognition for her work in cocoa farming, winning the cocoa board’s regional award for the most enterprising cocoa farmer in 2016 and then the national award in 2019, she began to share her approach — with women. She began in 2019 with 10, and now her collective has a staggering 809 women, all supporting each other.
In Ghana, as in Trinidad, there was a law, dating from colonial times, that said all cocoa had to be sold through the Board of Cocoa, which set the prices. The chocolate resulting from the beans was virtually all being made by Western companies, who were reaping the majority of the profits. When she began to think about the economics of the industry, Yankey had the same breakthrough as Goddard and came to the same conclusion: She decided to make her own. “I was threatened with jail,” she told me, when the board told her she had to sell all her beans to them. She answered that the law did not say what form the beans should be in and hers were in the form of chocolate, with value added, and therefore commanded a higher price. “There was nothing they could say!” she told me, laughing. “In this way, I defeated them.” The law in Ghana still holds, unlike in Trinidad, although it only benefits foreign powers, not Ghanaians themselves.
I asked how she learned. “Instagram was my teacher, in the beginning,” she replied. “But then [Goddard] called me.” They met regularly on Zoom and “through our virtual meetings, she taught me how to temper and all the other methods I needed to know.” Goddard managed to ship a grinder to Ghana to help Yankey develop the business and gave constant support and connections to help with selling or providing technical know-how. This was the power of the Cross Atlantic Cocoa Cooperative.
“Most of us are farmers, a few are not, but all of us have this common motivation of bridging the gap between the well-to-do and the less endowed,” Yankey said, echoing many of my conversations with Goddard. Dee Woods, another member of the Chocolate Rebellion and the cofounder of the African and Caribbean Heritage Food Network in London, is aligned with these aims. “It truly excites me as a Pan-Africanist and reparationist to see this growing global movement of care, repair, agency and collective economics,” she told me. “[It’s] a life-changing strategic system change.”
But although their chocolate is already being sold around the world, Goddard feels there is still a lot to do. She might be diverting some of the water from heading to the reservoir in the Global North but there are structures still in place that ensure much of the profit still flows that way.
The data Goddard collected, showing that $2,000-worth of cocoa beans from Trinidad could be sold for $12,000 if made into chocolate, also showed that Western companies could make a further $5,000 on the ready-made chocolate, “even without doing anything much.” This is because “the structure is established and exploitative. The Global North will always win at this point, and that’s why we want to own the whole supply chain.” For example, the shipping companies going from the Caribbean or Africa to factories in the West are owned by Western companies. And so Goddard is planning a crowdsourced ship to transport the collective’s chocolate — “a sailing ship, so that it doesn’t rely on fossil fuels.”
This shows the holistic approach Goddard takes, in keeping with her view of businesses, communities and societies as ecosystems. Her work isn’t about chocolate, but rather chocolate is a vehicle for the work. “It’s about setting the philosophy, not aiming for the product” is the way Goddard put it. “The philosophy or intention is indigeneity, that is, centering diversity and centering relationships, seeing the importance of each thing in the system rather than assuming the supremacy of humans.” The ARC tagline is “centering the periphery.” When I tell her that that’s always been the unofficial motto of New Lines, she’s delighted with the serendipity. “If that is the basic approach,” she tells me, “you don’t need to worry about the end product. It will look after itself.”
When I ask about the future, she admits she had it easy with chocolate, a popular product that is straightforward to make, transport and sell. At home in Trinidad, they market a range of traditional products, including cocoa tea and the fine chocolate that doesn’t travel well, as well as selling the more robust forms of chocolate to the global market.
“I would like to do the same with mining, to own the supply chain, but that’s far more dangerous to take on.” But with indigeneity as the philosophy, there’s no need to plan. “Nothing is directly planned,” she says, “at least not with any deliberate intention. The forest doesn’t have any intention but does fine when left to itself.” The Cross Atlantic Cocoa Cooperative grew this way, to encompass a community cafe in Baltimore, Degentrification, which does far more than chocolate. The chocolate, again, is one plank of an approach to building communities, serving as a model for what can be achieved through centering the peripheries.
At home in York, the Rowntree’s factory is the only one left of the big old family sweets firms, but that’s not the end of the connection between the city and chocolate. Artisanal chocolate makers are springing up and my Christmas present from a York-based uncle was a selection of chocolate from York Cocoa Works: truffles, bars of single-origin chocolate and drinking chocolate. They make it on the shop premises in town, and also have an on-site cafe. With tours of the facility and chocolate-making workshops, their diverse business model would delight Goddard.
As I taste the fine chocolate from Sierra Leone, handmade from beans proven to have a nonexploitative supply chain, I seem to sense it anew, aware of the potential of the bar to change lives. The heat of Trinidad and Ghana, which I observed in my interviews from my desk in the darkness of York’s midwinter, is transformed by this “king” or “golden” tree into the sweetness so central to our Christmas celebrations. There isn’t an inherent problem with such a globalized world; it is the structural problems left over from colonial times which keep the producers of the product in poverty while enriching companies elsewhere. With this different approach being pioneered by Goddard and others, we can start to enjoy our chocolate with a clear conscience.
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