agricultural · input
Fermented/dried cacao beans, processed into chocolate. Côte d'Ivoire + Ghana grow ~60% of world cocoa; subject to disease, weather and child-labor concerns and extreme 2024 price spikes.
7
Source countries
4
Companies
1
Goods affected
0
Claims on record
What depends on it
1 essential American goods rely on cocoa beans somewhere upstream in their supply chain.
Where it comes from
Share of global supply, by country.
| Country | Share of supply |
|---|---|
| CICôte d'Ivoire | 38% |
| GHGhana | 12% |
| ECEcuador | 10% |
| CMCameroon | 7% |
| NGNigeria | 6% |
| BRBrazil | 5% |
| IDIndonesia | 4% |
Who makes it
4 companies produce cocoa beans.
World's largest cocoa grinder and industrial chocolate manufacturer. Operates 60+ factories globally. Wieze, Belgium is world's single largest chocolate plant (~350,000 MT/yr). Annual grind capacity ~1.2M MT. Supplies Nestlé, Hershey, Jacobs Douwe Egberts under outsourcing agreements.
Second-largest global cocoa grinder. Operates grinding in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Netherlands, Indonesia. Integrated farm-to-factory model. Supplies Mondelēz, Mars, and foodservice.
ECOM Agroindustrial Corp. (Lugano Switzerland; private; founded 1849; owned by the Esteve family) is the world's #3 green coffee trader by volume, handling ~9-11% of global green coffee trade including significant Robusta volumes from Vietnam and Indonesia. ECOM's key Robusta asset is Dakman Vietnam — a wholly owned subsidiary based in Buôn Ma Thuột, Dak Lak province, Vietnam's coffee heartland — which operates warehouse, processing, and direct export operations. Dakman Vietnam is one of the largest single exporters of Vietnamese Robusta by volume and has established direct sourcing relationships with farmers in the Central Highlands that give ECOM/Dakman preferential access to premium Robusta lots during tight supply. ECOM also operates in Côte d'Ivoire (West African Robusta) and Indonesia (Sumatra Robusta). ECOM's Swiss parent structure and family ownership make it opaque by public-company standards; trade press estimates place ECOM coffee volume at ~6-8 million bags/year.
Olam's food ingredients division (spun out as 'ofi'); world's largest black pepper exporter from Vietnam (27,800 MT in 2024, 11.1% of Vietnam's total exports, 19.65% of Vietnam export value). Also major trader/processor of coffee, cacao, nuts, dairy, and other food ingredients globally. Olam's Long Binh branch (Vietnam) is the dominant single-company black pepper exporter. The 'ofi' business controls farm-to-factory supply chains for multiple critical food ingredients simultaneously — pepper for meat seasoning and coffee for beverage supply chains from the same sourcing network.
