World Forest ID is partnering with ECOCOA, a “bean-to-bar” initiative that brings full transparency, from cocoa sourcing with cooperatives in Cameroon to production at their chocolate factory in Belgium. Their vertically integrated model ensures sustainable and ethical cocoa farming practices and product integrity, resulting in high-quality chocolate sold at a premium that benefits the growers directly. 

For World Forest ID, this partnership provides a unique opportunity to analyze samples from a single, fully traceable supply chain. Supported by a grant from the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG, Kew), and Meise Botanic Gardens, this initiative allows our scientists to test cocoa beans alongside their derivatives—cocoa butter, cocoa powder, and the final chocolate product.

By analyzing the chemistry of known samples at every stage of processing we can identify each sample’s unique chemical signature and establish a traceable “fingerprint” linking it back to a harvest origin. Caspar Chater, Senior Research Leader at RBG, Kew adds, “Chocolate production is a complex process and, to-date, we’ve only analyzed cacao beans straight from the pod.  Having the opportunity to test the beans and their direct derivatives gives us a great chance to see how signals of harvest origin appear and change throughout that process. From bean to bar, so to speak.”

This collaboration marks World Forest ID’s second cocoa project with ECOCOA’s parent consultancy, ETICWOOD. In 2022, ETICWOOD collected cocoa samples for our reference collection in the same farms as the team visited this year - which also allows us to assess the consistency of chemical reference signatures over multiple harvest years. By analyzing samples from the same source two years later, World Forest ID can monitor the stability of these markers, strengthening the reliability of our origin modeling for the long term.

Cameroon, the world’s fifth-largest cocoa producer, relies on cocoa as a critical cash crop. Rising prices and high global demand, especially from the EU—Cameroon’s largest cocoa consumer in 2019¹—has pushed cocoa farming into primary forests, increasing the risk of forest degradation and deforestation. For Cameroonian suppliers, establishing traceable, transparent supply chains that meet market standards is essential to maintaining market access. As Julien Philippart, Deputy Director at ETICWOOD, explains, “For small-scale producers, the main advantage of working directly with chocolatiers is the removal of intermediaries, allowing the added value from the premium chain to go directly to them. This creates an economic incentive to produce sustainable cacao, thereby reducing the risk of deforestation linked to its cultivation.”