The solar-powered chocolate factory supplied by a sailing ship
Happy Easter! How green is the chocolate you're munching this year?
Next week, an 80 year-old sailing ship laden with a cargo of cacao beans will amble into the Port of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. As soon as she has docked, a gaggle of workers will trot aboard, heave the heavy cacao bean-stuffed sacks onto their shoulders – and begin bringing them ashore.
For Chocolatemakers, a Dutch chocolate company, transporting some of the cacao beans it uses this way – those sourced from the Dominican Republic – is part of a multi-pronged approach to reducing emissions.
“It’s not about making heaps of money, it’s about being sustainable,” says Kirsi van Scheijndel, Chocolatemakers’ impact manager. “We want to prove that this can be done differently.”
In recent decades, many chocolate firms have tried to make their operations more ethical and sustainable. The most famous example is arguably the Grenada Chocolate Company, founded by Mott Green, who sadly died in an accident in 2013.
Good eggs?
Perhaps because chocolate production has long been associated with child labour, unfair prices for farmers – and more recently the impact of climate change on cacao plantations – a handful of chocolate companies are increasingly marketing themselves as good eggs. They say that chocolate production can actually benefit the communities that grow cacao beans, and also that there are clever ways to lower the not insignificant emissions associated with chocolate-making.
A 2018 study, for example, found that the UK chocolate industry alone was responsible for two million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions – equivalent to the annual emissions from more than 465,000 petrol cars.
Take German chocolate brand Ritter Sport. It says it reduced its annual electricity consumption by nearly one megawatt hour, just by “optimising stirring intervals” of its chocolate mixture during production. Other companies emphasise that their ingredients are organic, or that the farmers they work with avoid using pesticides.
According to Chocolatemakers’ website, the Dutch firm offers “planet-loving deliciousness”. Now that the chocolate-filled Easter season is upon us, I wanted to find out what they meant by that. So, I called them up.
For one thing, I’m told, there’s the renewable energy the factory generates. “Our entire roof is made out of solar panels,” says van Scheijndel. In 2024, she adds, these panels supplied 83 megawatt hours of electricity – which equates to more than half of the 141 megawatt hours that Chocolatemakers consumed that year.
The company is in the process of acquiring more solar panels to further reduce its reliance on the grid and eventually become “a chocolate producer that only produces chocolate on solar energy”.
In neighbouring Belgium, another chocolate company opened a 100% renewables-powered factory in 2023. Belcolade’s facility in the village of Erembodegem also gets 90% of its water supply from collected rainwater.
The sweet spot
On the factory floor at Chocolatemakers’ plant, there are second-hand machines that help process cacao beans in order to make cocoa powder – the key ingredient in chocolate. While the firm currently uses biogas to roast the beans, van Scheijndel adds, “We have a plan to change that into an electrical roaster in the next few years.”
And Chocolatemakers recently installed a water-source heat pump for heating its chocolate during production. This slashed total electricity demand by around 20%, or 26 megawatt hours.
The firm currently requires around one kilowatt hour of electricity for each kilogram of chocolate it produces, says van Scheijndel. (This does not include the biogas energy used for roasting the cacao beans.)
A paper published last year by researchers in China suggests that the energy intensity of making one kilo of chocolate can vary quite a bit – from less than one kilowatt hour to several kilowatt hours.
While Chocolatemakers transports its cacao beans from the Dominican Republic by old-fashioned sailing ship – the vessel makes a roughly 7,500 kilometre transatlantic journey once a year – all the other beans used by Chocolatemakers arrive via more modern commercial vessels.
To deliver some of its chocolate, the company organises twice-yearly “chocolate rides”, in which roughly 100 volunteers pack their e-bikes with products from the company and ferry them across the border to Germany. “It’s a kind of party,” says van Scheijndel when I ask why people would sign up voluntarily to do this.
Chocs away
But is this be any cleaner emissions-wise than, say, loading up an electric truck and sending it to multiple destinations?
Van Scheijndel sends me some data on estimated emissions associated with the bicycle-based delivery journeys. However, it doesn’t reveal whether an electric vehicle on a multi-stop delivery route would actually be more polluting. Van Scheijndel says she plans to make a more detailed comparison in the future, to see if that approach would be better, in terms of emissions, than the volunteers and their e-bikes. Though it might, conceivably, be less fun.
Elsewhere, Chocolatemakers is funding agroforestry systems in countries that produce the cacao beans it uses. This year, the company is set to begin “rehabilitating” 400 hectares of land in Colombia by planting cacao trees.
I ask whether this will involve any rewilding. While van Scheijndel says that is not part of the plan, the idea is to allow for a smattering of native plants within the plantations, in order to improve carbon sequestration in the landscape without creating a monoculture. “The local trees and plants are of high importance since they support the local fauna but also provide shade,” she says.
And, she makes another point: Chocolatemakers works with cacao bean cooperatives in multiple countries to ensure that the farmers employed by those cooperatives receive a living wage. In Colombia alone, the firm plans to support more than 200 families. Chocolatemakers says it always pays a fair price for its cacao beans and that 85% of those payments go straight to the farmers.
It all sounds very worthy, though there are other options for eco-conscious consumers. Some companies in Europe are using locally produced fava beans, carob or sunflower seeds instead of cacao beans in an attempt to make chocolate alternatives with lower shipping-associated emissions. I wrote about such efforts earlier this month for BBC News.
For those who choose to stick with real chocolate – and who can blame them – they might be motivated to seek out greener products so long as they can find data from companies to back it up. Being open about this will surely help consumers make their decisions.
What Chocolatemakers is up to is certainly interesting. Though might the emphasis on sustainability make it harder to compete with the big dogs of the confectionary market?
“We like to lead by example,” says van Scheijndel. “The niche chocolate market has a very specific type of consumer. They value good-quality chocolate – but also the social impacts we make.”
Further reading on this week’s story
A paper published online last month finds that dark chocolate production has significantly lower emissions than milk chocolate production.
A 2022 report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank, explains production and sustainability trends in the cocoa sector in detail.
Emissions from transportation in the chocolate industry cancel out the benefits of using organic production for cacao beans, according to a study published in 2020.
Update: Added a paragraph about Chocolatemakers’ efforts to ensure cacao farmers receive a living wage.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also subscribe to The Reengineer and follow me on Bluesky.