Cocoa

Sucden Cocoa aims to be a leading supplier of cocoa to the chocolate and cocoa processing industries.

GLOBAL REACH

Sucden Cocoa’s head office in Paris serves as a hub for Sucden’s sourcing, logistics, marketing, and trading operations. General Cocoa, which is based in New York and which was acquired in 2014, has provided the company with a strong marketing arm in North America as well as global sourcing and product trading capabilities.
 
We are committed to building sustainable supply chains and work closely with our clients and suppliers to implement certified, traceable, or customized programs on behalf of these clients.

MARKET EXPERTISE

We source cocoa beans and products from all major producing origins. In Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria, we source on the ground and operate warehouses and export facilities. We actively originate cocoa beans from Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Papua New Guinea. Our vast network and capabilities, however, provide us with a platform to source beans from other origins. We also source cocoa products from the United States and Europe as well as from producing countries.

We have a global sales footprint, supplying cocoa beans and products to the world’s leading chocolate manufacturers and processors. Sucden originates approximately 500,000 tons of beans equivalent annually.

Sucden is one of the last existing cocoa trading houses. Since we do not have holdings in processing or chocolate manufacturing, we are uniquely positioned in the industry. We focus solely on sourcing to ensure we can provide our processing and chocolate manufacturing customers with competitively priced raw materials.

Thanks to Sucden Group’ strong financial basis with close to $1 billion in equity and a solid risk profile, we can trade large volumes and invest for the long term.

The global supply and demand of cocoa beans is generally in equilibrium, making access to information essential to mitigating market volatility and maximizing financial performance. Obtaining information from many producing countries can prove to be challenging. As such, Sucden Cocoa has developed its own fundamentals research capability in order to closely monitor and analyze crop developments across the principal producing origins.
 
Cocoa is a fragile cash crop, often grown by small-holder farmers in remote areas: two factors which contribute to the difficulty of sourcing cocoa. In order to originate cocoa successfully, Sucden therefore builds long term partnerships with farmers and suppliers, thereby helping to secure the supply of cocoa. When appropriate, Sucden also provides pre-financing in an effort to help improve the liquidity within the supply chain.

SUSTAINABLY SOURCED COCOA

To better address the concerns of deforestation due to the cultivation of cocoa, Sucden joined the Cocoa and Forests Initiative (CFI) in March 2019 and published our implementation plan for work in Ghana and Ivory Coast in September.  As a further expression of our engagement in this important work, Sucden announced in May 2019 a Forests Protection Policy applicable to its cocoa sourcing. The Policy underlines our commitment to prevent deforestation in the global cocoa supply chain, achieve traceability in the direct supply chain and contribute to the rehabilitation and conservation of degraded landscapes.  

To enhance our efforts to improve labor practices on cocoa farms, Sucden joined the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) in November 2019 as a contributing partner. The expertise of ICI is helping us to evaluate and improve our child labor monitoring and remediation programs in Ghana and Ivory Coast.

Our long term priority is to support our partners whilst continuing to build our ability to deliver sustainably sourced cocoa in which our clients can have the upmost confidence.

Read more about our work to source sustainable cocoa.