I’m proud to work for one of the world’s leading snacking companies with ambitions to drive meaningful change, including by helping to make cocoa sourcing more sustainable through Cocoa Life. Our Cocoa Life team is focused on helping lift the people and protect the landscapes, with the aim of bringing dynamic change to communities and forests where cocoa beans grow.

2023 has been a year of managing the program scale-up and driving innovative partnerships while embracing sector-wide challenges. Prices of cocoa have risen considerably, as a result of declining supply of cocoa over the past year, which is largely due to the changing climate and weather’s impact on cocoa yield. At the same time, the sector is focused on getting ready for upcoming regulations and their implementation. Despite those challenges and dynamic developments, we remain focused on implementing Cocoa Life and continue to deliver our program initiatives with our valued partners.

Published this week, Mondelēz International’s 2023 Snacking Made Right Report provides an update on our key actions and latest partnerships.

2023 Progress Update across our key areas

I’m pleased to report that in 2023 we continued to scale up the Cocoa Life program reaching approximately 243,000¹ farmers and around 3,200¹ cocoa communities. We are also working towards our 2025 goal to source all the cocoa volumes needed for our chocolate brands, on a mass balance approach, through the program. By the end of 2023, approximately 85%¹ of cocoa volume for Mondelēz International chocolate brands was sourced through Cocoa Life.¹

Key progress by the end of 2023 across our three key focus areas includes:

Partnership is key to address current challenges in the cocoa sector

2023 came with continued strong progress for Cocoa Life, alongside a range of new partner opportunities with potential to help address systemic challenges in this changing environment.

As I am passionate and excited about the importance and increasing opportunity for strategic partnerships, let me highlight a few that we’ve been driving over the past year:

• We welcome our new External Advisory Council with Andrew Bovarnick from UNDP and Lilian Mramba from Grassroot Business Fund. You can learn more about our external advisors and partners here.
• We are partnering with CARE International through a new initiative, the Opportunity Fund to unlock new profitable business opportunities for community members engaged in Village Saving & Loan Associations and to help foster greater income diversification for cocoa farming households, in particular for women.
• We signed a new Memorandum of Understanding with Côte d’Ivoire’s ministry of women, family and children in August 2023 to strengthen joint efforts on child protection and work towards the common vision of a child free labor sector – read the full announcement here.
• As a founding member of the Cocoa & Forests Initiative, we have been co-leading the Asunafo-Asutifi landscape initiative in Ghana, with the cocoa industry, farming communities and local partners, to address deforestation as a result of expansive agriculture, in the Asunafo-Asutifi Hotspot Intervention Area (HIA).
• Continued conversation and collaboration with partners – like cocoa farming communities, suppliers, NGOs, governments – is key for transformational impact and important for us to co-create new solutions and scale up what works.

Looking Forward: Moving Cocoa Further, Faster Together

As we look to 2024 and beyond, we remain focused on implementing the program to support cocoa farming communities while helping address root causes and build a more resilient supply of cocoa for our business.

We continue collaborating and innovating with actors within and beyond the sector to help address the sector’s current challenges, get ready for upcoming regulations and plan for the future together.

Based on our experience for more than a decade, we’re conscious that solutions need to go beyond compliance to address sector-wide systemic issues. Changing systems takes time – it needs ambitious collaboration and adaptation to changing environments. We need cross-sector partnerships, continued innovation and better collaboration that prioritizes the needs of cocoa farmers and their communities. We encourage everyone in the cocoa sector and beyond to embrace ambitious public-private partnerships and other collaborations that center on the needs of farmers. This is why we invite others to join us in the CARE Opportunity Fund and to continue to share learnings on innovations and approaches taken.