Dr. Bronner’s Makes Chocolate That's Fair Trade & Delicious

What if I told you some of the best tasting, most ethically produced chocolate was being made by a soap company?

Dr. Bronner’s Magic All-One Chocolate launched in Fall 2021 with six flavors (Salted Dark, Roasted Whole Hazelnuts, Salted Whole Almonds, Salted Almond Butter, Crunchy Hazelnut Butter, and Smooth Coconut Praline), and they recently added a seventh (Cool Peppermint Cream). All the bars contain 70% dark fair trade organic cocoa from Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, are sweetened with low-glycemic fair trade organic coconut sugar, and flavored with fair trade organic bourbon vanilla beans. Any coconut used is also fair-trade organic and all nuts are organic. Like its soap, the chocolate’s sustainability and fair-trade practices are described on the label. Read more about fair trade, direct trade and transparent trade.

For those not familiar, Dr. Bronner’s All-One Magic Soap has been a hippie cult classic since 1948, when it was launched by Emanuel Bronner who touted the castille soap’s 18-in-one powers—all listed on the iconic blue label in tiny type. Dr. Bronner’s is now run by two of Emanuel’s grandsons, who have made sustainability and ethical sourcing tentpoles of the brand.

But how did a soap company get into chocolate?

It all goes back to the soap. When Head of Special Operations Gero Leson and CEO David Bronner learned that many of the 800 farmers who supply the company’s palm oil through their Regenerative Organic Certified Serendipalm project in Ghana for their castile soaps also grew cocoa, it presented the perfect opportunity. Suddenly, the company had a path to affordable, fair trade, organic—and most importantly, delicious—cocoa.

We spoke with Gero Leson to learn more about the company’s practices, what goes into running an organic cacao farm in Ghana, and how and why chocolate joined their portfolio.

How did Dr. Bronner’s get into the chocolate business?

We really were not interested in cocoa at all. Dr. Bronner’s had decided to shift the production of our ingredients for the soap to organic and fair-trade sources. That was the crazy idea in 2005, and we never looked back. In Ghana, we built a palm oil mill, supplied by smallholder farmers—no plantations—that project emerged in 2009. We realized that many of our organic oil palm farmers also grew cocoa. The problem is in Ghana, it’s almost impossible to grow cacao organically, meaning people will use pesticides with cocoa because they’re afraid of yield loss.

And so these guys had been a headache to us because they spray, and then we have to deal with the drift on our neighboring palm oil, which is certified organic.

So we started converting some of our palm oil farmers to organic cocoa production. It was a slow process and maintaining farmers was a challenge. [After a while], Mike and David Bronner started paying attention, and the idea of chocolate came up, even though we mostly make soap. They said, “We already have regenerative means, so why don’t we make a chocolate?” And that was a fantastic idea that has taken about four years to realize.

Broken cocoa pods showing beans – Atobriso, Ghana, 2021

Who makes your chocolate?

We brought in a fantastic chocolate guru named Joe Winney, who was one of the founders of Theo Chocolate. He visited us in Ghana early on and I wanted to sell him our organic cacao beans, but then he left Theo and came on board as our advisor, to help us design our chocolate and the various flavors. And our chocolate is made in Switzerland. We work with two Swiss companies. The first one roasts, shells, and then grinds the beans, and then the second one makes the chocolate, and they’re both fantastic.

So do all your cacao beans come from Ghana?

We realized that if our chocolate became a success, we would not have enough beans just from our farmers in Ghana—and conversion [to organic] takes a while. So then we started looking for other compatible farmer groups who could also do organic and fairtrade. Those were our requirements, and we’re also interested in going toward regenerative organic. Someone on our team who works in certification knew a woman named Louise from Côte d’Ivoire, which is the world’s largest producer of cacao beans. She had founded a woman’s cocoa co-op in 2016, but she hadn’t been able to get funding and also the premiums that she thought should be paid to farmers to make it worthwhile. So we decided to work with Louise and her co-op, called KANY. So now we’ve got three sources: two in Ghana and one in Côte d’ Ivoire.

What are the challenges of growing organic cacao in Ghana?

Farmer Martha Addo happily harvesting cocoa pod – Atobriso, Ghana, 2021

Cacao growing in Ghana was there long before we were there—it’s their biggest export crop. But it’s largely conventional, with lots of pesticides sprayed. And there are concerns about trustworthiness, because the government is deeply involved in the trades. There is increasing organic cacao in Ghana, but much of it is organic maybe by name only, because cheating is relatively easy. So what you need to do is to make sure that they don’t commingle conventional [with organic], which is the common way to cheat. Additionally, we cannot buy our own beans, but rather there are intermediaries inserted by the government. We just make sure that on the ground we control and monitor the purchasing process as much as we can. It’s easier in Côte d’ Ivoire, because there you can buy your own beans. So there, you just go to the farmers that you know.

How does the Dr. Bronner’s brand help consumers navigate the chocolate aisle?

Dr. Bronner’s Salted dark chocolate bar — Salted dark chocolate bar

Good is in the eye of the beholder, or really in the mouth of the beholder, so oftentimes it can be hard to tell but we try our best to meet quality criteria. Any greenwashing campaign can make consumers feel better because they think what they’re eating is “good,” except what we do is true. The stories you hear from Côte d’ Ivoire, it’s such a rotten snake pit, the way certification works, and the cargos—the larger brands who make commodity chocolate, the kind of stuff they tell about the conditions on the ground, just makes you laugh or cry, whatever mood you’re in. And so you differentiate yourself from that. Try to tell a story that has more substance, and then you act on it. And that hopefully makes some consumers feel better. Consumers of Dr. Bronner’s products at least have the hope, if they’re informed, that what we do is better than what others do.

What does Dr. Bronner’s want to change about the chocolate industry?

Cacao is an amazing crop. It just got a bad reputation, because of the conditions under which it’s grown and shipped. And that’s something we would like to touch. In Ghana, we’ve done a large child labor research project and awareness building with farmers. We thought about why do people have the kids work on the farm in the first place? It’s because they don’t have the money for contractors. And that’s because the price of cacao in the world market is so low. We address that by paying premiums. And the other aspect is to help increase yields. Bean yields with most small hold farmers in West Africa are super low because trees are planted too densely and there’s not enough pruning. And so to us, helping farmers improve yields per acre is one of the key issues by which we can help them improve their economics and profitability. So it’s social, it’s paying better prices, but it’s also helping on the economics of it with a better yield.