The Real Bitterness of Chocolate & Derivatives in Cosmetics
For those of you who are ex-pats like me, trying to find TV news in your own language can be a struggle depending which country you are living in. Where I am I manage to pick up CNN International and have been following their year long series of documentaries and reports called the Freedom Project highlighting the soul wrenching plight of slaves and trafficked individuals be they men, women or children.
In recent weeks I followed an undercover report on the harvesting of cocoa for chocolate companies in Africa and Latin America, but notably in Côte D'Ivoire.
As you can imagine, a tragic situation unravelled, highlighting the plight of more than 200,000 slaves - all of them children. These were being openly bought and sold to harvest the cocoa pods because they were "cheaper" than employing adults.
Cote D"Ivoire itself produces 43% of the world"s cocoa and enslaves children from neighbouring Mali and Burkino Faso, in addition to those from Cote D"Ivoire itself.
When CNN managed to interview some of these children, they had clearly been abused, and all they wanted was to be able to go to go home and go to school. Although all the big chocolate companies - at least the top 5, with a combined 2010 profit of more than 10 billion GBP - have signed up to the Harkin-Engel Protocol of 2001 in relation to child labour in the industry, there are still more than 200,000 children still being abused in this way.
When a cocoa bean is processed it makes roughly equal parts butter and powder. The butter goes into melt-in-your-mouth products, as well as soaps and cosmetics. The powder is used in cakes, biscuits and drinks.
In recent years powder demand has definitely outpaced butter demand, which has been based on the fact that most of the applications in emerging countries are powder-based.
Global chocolate sales rose 2 percent to $83.2 billion in 2010, according to market research firm Mintel. This was helped by growth in places such as China, where sales rose 21 percent to $976 million, and Indonesia -- the biggest chocolate-eaters in South East Asia -- where sales climbed 26 percent to $888 million.
Importantly, it was demand for powder which rose fastest. Singapore-based Petra Foods Limited, the world's third-largest supplier of cocoa ingredients, estimates annual global cocoa butter consumption is now between 900,000 and 1 million tons, an increase from 850,000-900,000 tons two years ago. Demand for powder has risen faster, to 1.1-1.2 million tons from 800,000-850,000 two years ago.
It is estimated that a massive 150,000 tons of butter is stored around the world at present: working stocks are usually between 20,000 and 40,000 tons. As a general rule, powder and butter can both be stored for up to 18 months.
Some people have suggested that butter will find other uses if its price falls to $1,500 a ton. This might include replacing palm oil in some applications. However, that price is more than $1,500 away!
So you may ask, what does this have to do with cosmetics? Our industry uses chocolate in various forms, mainly as cocoa butter and other derivatives, and so this does have a lot to do with our industry!
As an industry that cares about it sourcing of raw materials, we need to pay more attention and be proactive in the supply chain of all of our ingredients, and to understand that any document carrying an impressive signature does not mean that the product you have bought or are using has cost the life of a child. What price vanity?