Story
Chocolate equipment - Oakland, CA
Three driven characters lead the audience through the creation of a bean-to-bar chocolate factory in Brazil. They reveal a story about community, inspiration, social entrepreneurship and shifting trends in business.
Frederick — an unorthodox entrepreneur committed to social action — partners with Diego — a mystical cacao farmer — to create exceptional organic chocolate at the first source-to-bar factory in Brazil. Chloé — a world renowned chocolate connoisseur who recently set up a Bolivian source-to-bar company — follows their journey with interest. As they change the world through chocolate, they themselves are transformed.
The mission of the Chocolate project — film, book and website — is to educate the audience, as consumers, about where food comes from and inspire them to learn more. Through an entertaining story about social entrepreneurs, Chocolate brings attention to the important issues of reforestation, sustainable farming practices and economic independence of cacao farmers. The topic of chocolate is easily accessible and will engage a wide audience to the larger narrative: the impact of food sourcing on local communities.
Chocolate will be an educational tool for farmers, producers and consumers to realize the power of their role in trade cycles. Chocolate will explore social entrepreneurship as a self-fulfilling cycle which rewards the grower, the producer and the consumer. Sourcing sustainably-farmed organic growers creates better food products, which grosses higher profits and creates better farming conditions which delivers immediate rewards and builds incentives for continued high-quality harvests in the future.
Every year, more than five million family farms in countries like Cote d’Ivoire, Indonesia, Cameroon, Vietnam and Brazil produce about three million tons of cocoa beans. These farmers face many challenges: diseases that eliminate an estimated one third of cocoa crops worldwide, deforestation, little access to the latest technology and limited business training to effectively market their product. Some farmers are giving up growing cacao and cutting down the rainforest to plant other products, which may be easier to grow in the short-term but are causing greater long-term damage.
There is a large wave of new chocolatiers popping up, especially in the US. Chocolate will be directed toward this and other consumer networks to influence their source-to-consumer business decisions.
Efforts like Frederick’s, Diego’s and Chloé’s will link high-quality chocolate from family farms to gourmets in Europe and North America. The farmers will gain income, independence and improved quality of life. The gourmets will enjoy new and unimagined delights of complex-flavored chocolates based on single varieties of cacao. The environment will benefit from organic and sustainable farming. And the diversity of cacao will be preserved for the pleasure of future generations.
While Chocolate focuses on a particular cacao-growing region in Brazil, the audience will easily connect how similar socio-corporate practices can be applied to other farming, production and consumption practices around the world.
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