The chocolate know-how: imagine a scenario in which Switzerland's chocolate barons agree to a "know-how transfer" enabling African cocoa exporters to create a home candy-bar industry. Swiss News examines the chances of this ever happening.
| Auteur | Shepard, Lyn |
A few years ago a visiting Senegalese cabinet minister, Abdou Sow, came directly to the point at a Lugano gathering of G-8 planners, investors, and African leaders discussing aid to developing African. "We want to use our resources to make things for export," Sow told his African Business Opportunity Day audience. "We don't need philanthropy. But our cocoa should be processed in Africa--not in Switzerland.
The remark went nearly unreported at the time, but the West African speaker received a thunderous hand of applause from New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) delegates. And those shaping G-8's African Action Plan lent intent ears to Sow's argument. Could what Sow suggests happen? And should it happen?
Nestle
The idea makes little sense to Vevey-based Nestle spokesman Marcel Rubin, but he admits that some of the Swiss chocolate giant's competitors already have African factories that serve as finishing plants. He says these include Dubendorf-based Barry Callebaut and the USA manufacturer Cargill as well as Britain's Arden Daniel Midlands.
A sizeable portion of cocoa, Rubin tells Swiss News in a phone interview, is transformed for beans or butter as done in these foreign countries. But Nestle, the world's largest food concern, has never considered chocolate an essential product in poor countries, so Sow's idea has never gained a receptive ear there. Nor is the idea of a future know-how transfer to African hands a topic the firm takes seriously.
A Gooey, Chewy Trend
"These countries cannot afford these luxury products," the company spokesman said, "It's only available to a small upper-class group and not in the masses. It is valued in a general sense, but the standard of living doesn't make it viable," he added By contrast, Chocosuisse reports that the average citizen in well-to-do Switzerland consumes 714 kilogram of chocolate during his or her lifetime Yet tastes for sweets are changing.
Rubin points out that cocoa. based candy--classic Swiss milk chocolate bars--has given way in recent years to gooey, chewy, nutty, crunchy favourites. He cites a rival confection. American Mars and Snickers bars, as examples of this market trend. The Nestle KitKat chocolate bar may also fit the description. The gradual shift in popular taste, Rubin says, gives Nestle even less incentive to see West Africa as anything more than a foreign sub-supplier. At last count Nestle had 28 production factories--nine of them in African cocoa countries, others...
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