We are delighted to let you know that our chocolates are finally here promoting fair ownership!
It’s been quite an eventful and long journey! We started dreaming of this ambitious project more than two years ago. Since then, we have been trying our best to align the vision of rightful ownership to all the stakeholders involved in the project to one common goal: Farmers, Owned food brands. Even though there happened to be a slight delay, we are much delighted to open the sales for our Right Origins Chocolate very soon.
We see many companies working towards fair ownership, and all their works deserve immense respect. It’s not easy to change the way you handle business within supply chains that are long and complex. But we, on the other hand, did not want to follow a conventional supply chain model. We believe shorter chains and shared profits can disrupt how food is produced and sold. That is how we thought of revolutionizing the supply chains using a design that brings more Transparency and trust for the end customers while creating a system for the primary producers, themselves earning more value and profit share for their products and promoting fair ownership.
For every Right Origins Chocolate that you buy, you can count on us to tell you the entire story of the production of that very chocolate bar, right from the day the cocoas which made it was plucked from their farms. Yes, we mean to tell you, using the particular talking bot we’ve designed for our Chocolate story. Blockchain technology ensures that the data you get is unadulterated and most viable.
The plan was set, and the project was set in motion in July 2018. The cocoa we needed was procured from the Indian state of Kerala. The farmers here are primarily small-scale planters whose agriculture mixed crops in their small farms and depend exclusively on these crops to make their living. The first step was to initiate farmers’ collectives in their respective localities and get their farms certified as a hundred percent organic. This was when our farmer cooperative, a.k.a. farmer producer company (these are organizations or models of a more transparent & trustworthy cooperative, co-owned by the farmers themselves), started their procurement process. But not all the odds were in favor of us.
The high ranges of Idukki, from which we procured our cocoas, is a beautiful range of mountains covered in fog for most of the time. But the weather wasn’t kind to us. The state of Kerala got its highest ever rainfall ever last year. Our farmers were graceful, not very much affected by the vast landslides and floods that followed the rains in most parts. But due to the heavy rains, we did not quite get the harvest we expected. But the people in this cooperative worked hard day and night for months to finally collect a sizable quantity.
By the time the rain subsided, it was already too late for us, and we were still in short of the required quantity. Altogether, the farmers who are part of this cooperative can contribute close to 1190 kg of dried cocoa beans. Since the production of 2 flavors of chocolate demanded a minimum of 2000 kg of dried beans, the cooperative sourced the rest from a trader called GoGround. The whole procurement process got delayed in all the mess by the disastrous floods, here and it was only by the end of October 2018 that we could finally ship it (a month delayed). To save time, we used air freight instead of sea freight to not miss the planned production schedule.
The shipment reached Switzerland by the first week of November. The dried beans were then sent to a roaster in Switzerland called Max Felchlin. But it was again too late by the time the cocoa mass reached our Swiss Factory (private labeling manufacturer). We got an email from the factory, saying that delivery by Christmas is no longer possible, and we could only get it by February or March. This delay meant, we miss the Christmas season & Valentine’s day as well, and hence we decided to push the final production process a little further towards October 2019.
Since we got more time due to the delay and shift of production planning, we decided to rework the wrapper designs. We sent the updated plans to Chocolate Stella Bernrain (our private labeling manufacturer) in July 2019. So this year, everything was set and was on schedule. The final production was set to happen in the first week of October, and our team went to the chocolate factory on the 3rd of October to see the final production stages of Right Origins chocolate.
It was a proud moment for all of us to watch the final stages of our chocolate production and knowing that the long work we had put into this project is finally going to be fruitful. Yet even still, this is just the beginning, and there are even miles further to walk for our dream in reaching the set goals.
At the same time, we get you the best chocolate we can, in the most trustworthy and fair ownership manners; it is also our responsibility and target to take back up to 80% of the profits share back to the farmers back home, which was our primary goal to invoke rightful ownership. These funds would be used to build processing units closer to farms and make more value-added products that they can sell. From the farmers, we have started our venture, and it is them these farmers that we are inspired from, and it is them we will be ever indebted to.
If you like to support our chocolate project & buy some chocolate bars, head on to rightorigins.com and place your order.