Tracing the Roots of Cocoa Traceability as a Current Buzzword whose impact we are yet to know

“However far a stream flows, it never forgets its source.” This old African proverb echoes a simple truth: origins matter. For generations, however, the global chocolate industry forgot, or ignored, the humble origins of its cocoa. In the late 19th century, clerks of the British Empire recorded how a Ghanaian blacksmith named Tetteh Quarshie planted the first cocoa seeds in the 1870s, seeding an industry that now generates billions. Yet ask a chocolate executive today exactly which farms grow their cocoa beans, and many will struggle to answer.

How did we get here? To understand the current push for traceability, the ability to track cocoa from bean to bar, we must journey back to when it all began, who championed it, and what problems it was meant to solve.

For most of the 20th century, cocoa flowed from millions of West African smallholders into a faceless global supply chain. Beans harvested by hand in villages would be mixed and traded through local buyers, governments and exporters, ending up as anonymous sacks in European ports. In those days, nobody in London or Zurich asked which exact village a cocoa sack came from. The system was designed for volume and efficiency, not visibility. Smallholder farmers, the very source of the cocoa stream, remained invisible at the far end of a long trade route.

As an Ivorian saying goes, “When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” The elephants, big cocoa traders and manufacturers fought for market share, while the farmers at the bottom – the grass – were trampled by low prices and neglect. Without traceability, problems at the farm level stayed hidden under the canopy.

By the late 1990s, however, the illusion of a “sweet” supply chain began to crack. Shocking reports emerged of young children doing hazardous work on cocoa farms, and even cases of child trafficking and forced labour. In 2000, a documentary crew’s footage of mistreated Malian boys on Ivorian farms stirred public outcry. Western consumers, blissfully unaware of the human cost of their chocolate bars, demanded answers. How could something as innocent as a chocolate bar involve child labour or slavery?

The industry scrambled for a response. In 2001, under threat of legislation