Entry: Ethan Budiansky, World Cocoa Foundation

The first week of October, WCF CLP Program Coordinator, Ethan Budiansky accompanied two WCF research fellows on a ‘cocoa tour’ of the Eastern United States. Jetro Nkengafac, a Cameroonian Borlaug fellow and Lukman, a Indonesian recipient of the Aceh Cocoa Fellowship program are both conducting cocoa research at the USDA research facilities. Their ‘cocoa tour’ brought them to the Camden International Commodities Terminal in New Jersey where they learned about quality testing of cocoa beans and explored the warehouses where thousands of bags of cocoa from around the world were stored. They visited the Research and Development team at Hershey Chocolate in Pennsylvania. There they learned about the hard work that goes into monitoring the quality and consistency of their chocolate merchandise and the effort that is behind the development of new chocolate products. They even had the opportunity to test their taste buds on cocoa liquor (product of pressed cocoa) produced from high quality beans. Finally, their tour brought them to the Mars Chocolate facility in Pennsylvania where they met the R&D team and toured through the Dove Chocolate factory, experiencing (and tasting) every step from bean to chocolate bar.

The Cocoa Borlaug Fellows Program is jointly implemented by USDA/FAS and WCF. The Aceh Cocoa Fellowship is part of the PEKA Project implemented by Swisscontact.