Sierra Leone has faced many challenges in recent history. Internal conflict followed by the Ebola crisis caused the cocoa market to collapse, leaving many cocoa farmers with difficult access to the world market. In 2015, Tradin Organic started working with these farmers to set up an organic certified cocoa sourcing project. We configured a local control system with dedicated quality coordinators and invested in trainings and registration for farmers. This allowed us to successfully pass the organic audit and start exporting organic cocoa. 

With our organic cocoa production in full swing, our activities in Sierra Leone are growing rapidly. We have our own sourcing and exporting office in Kenema and have trained a team of quality coordinators who ensure optimum quality. Each bag of cocoa beans is registered so they can be traced back to their respective farmer, and then transported by our own truck drivers to our warehouse in Kenema. Here our team checks the quality of the cocoa beans, before preparing the bags for export. The cocoa beans are exported to our own organic cocoa processing facility in the Netherlands, the Crown of Holland, where they are processed into cocoa liquor, butter and powder. For more information on our cocoa products, click here.

Our organic cocoa project in Sierra Leone is creating new opportunities for cocoa farmers. The farmers now have access to the world market and they receive an organic premium for their cocoa. For the future, we are planning to expand our program of farmer trainings, which aims to help our farmers to increase their productivity and income. 

In November 2018 we lanched a Farmer Field School project. This project will help farmers to improve their yields of cocoa and support famers to grow food crops next to their cocoa. 

We are very  proud to present our second sustainability report on organic cocoa. In this report we want to highlights the most important sustainability milestones of our cocoa sourcing & processing projects. 

Download The Report 

For a more in depth look at our processes, check out this video of our organic cocoa bean sourcing project in Sierra Leone. From collection to registering for traceability, the organic cocoa beans are then brought to our warehouse in Kenema where the beans are further dried and prepared for export.