We’re delighted with our wins in the annual Great Taste Awards, especially as two of the chocolates are made only with cocoa from Saint Lucia – the first is our own Rabot Estate 66% Dark Chocolate and the second is our Island Growers 50% Milk with Caramel and Sea Salt. Both were awarded 2 gold stars by the judges.

The Great Taste Awards are acknowledged as one of the benchmarks of high quality food and drink in the UK and have been described as the ‘Oscars’ of the food world. Many consumers see the award as an independent seal of quality, which is why this year over 1,500 producers entered over 7,400 of their products for blind tasting by industry experts.

As you can imagine the team in Saint Lucia were thrilled, Phil Buckley, our Estates Director, said, “Winning awards like this is fantastic for putting the fine cocoa of Saint Lucia back on the cocoa map – where it belongs. These awards are also a just reward for the sheer hard work and dedication of our team at Rabot Estate and all of the cocoa farmers who are part of our Engaged Ethics cocoa programme. I can’t wait to tell them that their cocoa has won another prestigious award!”

Other wins included:

3 Stars – Kirsch Cherries

2 Stars – Rabot Estate St. Lucia 66% Dark & Island Growers St. Lucia 50% Milk with Sea Salt Caramel

1 Star – Liquid Chocolat Aztec Chilli, Raspberry Liqueur Truffles, Soft Salted Caramels & Dizzy Pralines

We’ve been watching the media reports with interest this week, as the ban on cocoa exports from the Ivory Coast caused the price of cocoa to rise. I’m not too concerned as we have good contracts in place for a few months yet, by which time, I suspect the situation will have resolved itself, at least from the cocoa point of view.

But it’s the cocoa farmers I am thinking about. They are always at risk of falling into the poverty trap, as the price they receive for their cocoa fluctuates without warning depending on demand. There’s not a great deal of support or incentive for them to invest in their farms, improve their output quality or quantity, when they simply don’t know whether they will have a market for it. The buying companies are not having much success in creating sustainability for these smallholders.

I feel proud of the way we have turned things around for the St Lucian farmers we work with. We now have 107 independent growers in our scheme, all of them benefiting from our high fixed price, direct “no middle men” trading, guaranteed purchase of all their crops and quality support from our cocoa-growing research.

We’re only a small player and we’re in a specific territory, but we’ve turned around cocoa growing in St Lucia. Five years ago, it was on its knees, and now it’s a thriving industry again. Fair prices and prompt payment. It could be a repeatable model. And it definitely throws down the gauntlet to the big boys in cocoa buying.