CocoaAction is a voluntary industry-wide strategy that aligns the world’s leading cocoa and chocolate companies, origin Governments, and key stakeholders on regional priority issues in cocoa sustainability. It convenes the sector in order to align complementary roles and responsibilities, leverage scale and efficiency through collaboration, and catalyze efforts to accelerate sustainability in the cocoa sector. CocoaAction’s ambition in the longer term is to have global, sector-wide impact.

Barry Callebaut, Blommer, Cargill, Ferrero, The Hershey Company, Mars, Incorporated, Mondelēz International, Nestlé, and Olam are the companies that committed to the strategy. The initial focus is on Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, where CocoaAction companies have committed to reaching 300,000 farmers and 1,200 communities, with productivity and community development as priority issues. Last week the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), facilitator of CocoaAction, published the CocoaAction Primer, Community Development Manual and Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) Guide.

The CocoaAction Primer provides an overview of decisions and developments leading to CocoaAction today. It is an evolving document that is intended to provide the interested stakeholders with a clear, high-level overview of what CocoaAction is, what it does, and what it aims to achieve.

The Community Development Manual is written to provide CocoaAction companies and their implementing partners with guidance on what the Community Development commitments are, why these commitments were chosen, and what the elements are on which success will be measured.

The purpose of the M&E Guide is to give CocoaAction companies guidance on data collection in order to produce data as consistent as possible across companies. Quality and aligned data is the key to new learning — taking CocoaAction’s efforts in the pursuit of a more sustainable value chain to the fields and farmers and to measure jointly the development of the cocoa value chain and continuously improve the CocoaAction strategy.

These three documents are the commendable result of high level alignment between some of the leading cocoa and chocolate companies in the world. By making the documents public, CocoaAction is hoping to inform and further onboard all cocoa sector stakeholders to work together towards a sustainable cocoa sector.

NewForesight is proud to be part of the CocoaAction journey. Since its very start we have been involved and have contributed with strategic insights and support. For more information see our project page. All CocoaAction documents can be found here.