The news was announced by the European Cocoa Association (ECA) and the Association of Chocolate, Biscuit and Confectionery Industries of Europe (CAOBISCO) at the eighth ECA Forum in Rome on Thursday. Swiss members include heavyweights in the industry like Nestlé and Barry Callebaut, as well as the association of Swiss chocolate and biscuit manufacturers Chocosuisse-Biscosuisse.
To meet sustainability commitments, European chocolate companies have invested heavily in tracing where their main raw material comes from to ensure forests are not being cleared to grow cocoa. However, so far, each company worked on its own to develop its own sustainable cocoa supply chain and the traceability data was not shared.
ECA and CAOBISCO members have now pledged to share this data with Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world’s top cocoa-producing countries. Members’ individual cocoa-sourcing databases will be combined into an overarching database that will then be shared with the Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa boards.
“This data collection effort should feed into a combined database that is owned and driven by producing countries, in compliance with EU and national data privacy legislation, with the aim of achieving a robust nationwide traceability system,” said ECA and CAOBISCO in a joint statement.
Read the full article at: www.swissinfo.ch
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