Cacao-Trace
Great Taste, Doing Good
The Next Generation Cacao Foundation is an essential component of our commitment to sustainable cocoa sourcing. It serves as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting the social, economic, and environmental development of cocoa farming communities participating in our Cacao-Trace™ Sustainable Cocoa program.
Our mission is to create a sustainable future for the cocoa chain, and everyone involved. By enhancing cocoa flavor and quality, we create extra value shared with cocoa farming communities. This is achieved through the Quality Premium and the Chocolate Bonus. For the high-quality wet beans we receive from cocoa farmers, we pay a Quality Premium on top of the farmgate price. For every kg of Cacao-Trace chocolate sold, we collect 10 Eurocents. We collect this money and send it back 100% to cocoa farmers either in cash directly to the farmers, or through community projects. The projects aim at ensuring access to fundamental needs such as education or health and helping farmers and their families increase their revenue through the launch of small businesses.
In order to ensure complete transparency on the Chocolate Bonus distribution, the money is collected and redistributed through an independent foundation: the Next Generation Cacao foundation.
We aim to increase the Chocolate Bonus collection every year, to reach €8 Million in 2030.
Cacao-Trace program in facts & figures
Reaching 24,073 farmer families
€3.2M Collected Chocolate Bonus for our farmers in 2024
29 Post-Harvest Centers
72 Water facilities built
7 School projects initiated
358,620 trees planted
Our Cacao-Trace Program Around the World
Our sustainable standards
Building confidence through transparency is essential. We adhere to rigorous sustainability standards to ensure that our practices benefit both the environment and the cocoa farming communities.
The Cacao-Trace standard is built on a rigorous three-year verification cycle, including initial, surveillance, and re-verification audits. These external audits, conducted by Control Union, on annual basis to ensure unbiased feedback and high-quality cocoa production.
Our commitment to continuous improvement makes the Cacao-Trace standard unique. It evolves through insights from ground programs, auditor suggestions, due diligence, market priorities,
and global initiatives like the Cocoa Forest Initiative and regulatory compliance such as EUDR.
This dynamic approach ensures we consistently deliver excellence and sustainability in cocoa farming.
