You are currently on the Bean Tracker page.

Select your country first by clicking on the flag icon

skip to main content
Menu
serious statements
our promise

we trace our cocoa from bean to bar

1 of Tony’s Sourcing Principles is traceable beans. We trace our cocoa from bean to bar, allowing us to understand bean origins, producers and related social and environmental factors, which are all vital to taking responsibility and driving meaningful change. We have been doing this for our cocoa liquor since 2012 and for our cocoa butter since 2016. The software system we use to trace our beans, built with ChainPoint technology, is called BeanTracker.

BeanTracker digitally logs the data collection from cooperative to chocolate production and includes a monitoring tool for all actors in the supply chain to see where the beans are at any particular moment in time. The sweet spot? All supply chain actors are connected on this shared value chain platform and enter data about ‘incoming bean volumes’, ‘beans volumes on stock’ and ‘bean volumes going out’. This tells us which cooperative the beans in each container come from.

our cocoa’s journey 

The 2 countries we operate in – Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – work slightly differently concerning the governmental regulations of cocoa export. But generally speaking, the farmers deliver their cocoa beans to the cooperative’s warehouse, where the beans are put into sacks. The sacks are then transported by truck to the local exporter’s warehouse. From there, they make their way to our cocoa processors and into our bars. And the rest, as they say, is history.. 

scaling up-up-up 

The goal is to make BeanTracker a scalable solution that is not just for us but for the wider cocoa industry. This will hopefully lead to a system change by implementing an industry standard for the traceability of bean-to-bar to enable all cocoa companies to take responsibility across their supply chain.

This is why setting the right example with Barry Callebaut, one of the world’s largest cocoa processors, is so important. The installation of our own cocoa butter tank in the factory in 2016 was a milestone on this journey. This shows what is possible – if we can do it, other (large) companies that work with Barry Callebaut can do it, too. That’s a wrap!

read all news