Tim McCollum and the rest of the staff at Madécasse have an unusual way of measuring the success of their company.
“People who work with us in Madagascar weigh more than when we first started. Every time we go back, we notice that they have put on weight.”
In Madagascar, where 90% of the population live on less than $2 a day, only those with a decent income are able to afford to eat properly. The roughly 100 farmers who supply Madécasse with cocoa beans all have a stable contract and the security of knowing what they will earn each month, and so can feed themselves fairly well.
Their raw product is used to make chocolate that Wine Spectator called very high quality, and left the New York Times awestruck. The bars are different to any others not just because of their flavor and quality but because Madécasse oversees the process from start to finish. They are one of the only companies in Africa—where 70% of the world’s cocoa comes from but only 1% of chocolate is made—to do that.
Africa is the place where resources are often obtained but the continent seldom benefits from the finished product. McCollum and Brent Beach wanted to change that because they genuinely cared about Madagascar, having spent 10 years there as Peace Corps volunteers. They also knew that they could create something that would become a market leader.
“It’s really hard not to make good chocolate when you have the best source. The source is the cocoa beans and 80% of the flavor of the chocolate is in the cocoa beans,” says McCollum.
Madagascan cocoa is widely accepted as being a class above the rest simply because of its genetic variety. That fact was the start, realizing Madagascar’s potential was the next step.
Few people really know about Madagascar and McCollum and Beach were no different. When they were assigned there in 1998, they only had an inkling about where it was.
“It was before the internet and when I was told that was where I was being posted I wondered if it was the big island off the coast of Africa but I wasn’t sure,” says McCollum.
Minimal information meant that they went to Madagascar without expectation and so, allowed themselves to become absorbed in the experience.
“It was not like we were businessmen or diplomats; we were living in remote villages. People wondered, ‘Who is this white guy? Why doesn’t he wear sunglasses? Why is he buying tomatoes in the market?’ Slowly, we learned the local dialect and we gained acceptance and it was not long before they were calling us their children.”
It was there that the idea to start a complete chocolate making company was born, even though it seemed improbable.
“The beauty of innovation is that there is very fine line between what separates a good idea from an insane one. If we had looked at it on paper, we wouldn’t have done it. We knew it had never been done before and we knew it could be done,” says McCollum.
The actual chocolate making process was something they had to do a fair amount of Google searches on, but the mechanics of the job are not all that complicated. In fact, it is something a lot of us would like to do.
“It’s about developing a good palette. We had a lot of well-wishers and assistance, like the head of research and development of Mars. People who knew a lot more about chocolate than we did lined up behind us. They received our sample batches and gave us a lot of constructive feedback,” says Beach.
The team faced two major challenges in their endeavour, which sometimes continue to test them.
“Infrastructure is a major problem. The roads are bad and there is limited internet and phone access. And then there is a knowledge gap between what the American consumer wants and what the farmers produce. We are getting them to see the importance of consistency and protocol. The quality is there but it’s important to be consistent because that creates that nuanced flavor and that someone 8,000 miles away will pick up,” says Beach.
Education is an important part of the process. Each time McCollum and Beach go back to Madagascar they take an assortment of chocolate with them and have a tasting session with the chocolate makers on site.
“Everyone can taste the difference in our product,” says Beach.
To have such belief in the product signals a marked difference in attitude from when they first addressed a semi-circle of eight to 10 employees with their idea. They all took half a step backwards, presumably in disbelief at what they were being told.
Now, even things which were never done previously have been achieved with success. Making the actual chocolate and the packaging are two such activities.
“We taught villagers how to make chocolate. We also had to look at printing for the Western world because what the local printing press could do was of varying quality,” says McCollum.
Sometimes the uniformity dips but Madécasse has established itself as a company that can deliver an excellent product, all of the time. By doing that, they won over American consumers and credit them with driving their success. They also sell in over 2,000 stores across Europe and the United States and their chocolate is available throughout South Africa and Kenya.
While the product is spreading, the company does not have a big marketing budget and has no advertising at all. Instead, they rely on word of mouth, the quality of their product and the story behind it and through that they have become a known brand.
“People are interested in buying fairtrade products and ours is four times as good because the entire process happens in Madagascar,” McCollum says.
As a result Madécasse’s sales have doubled every year since they have started and the benefit is visible in the place they most wanted it to be.
“There is a noticeable change in the way the people we work with live. There are very few places for people to work in a formal sector in Madagascar and these people have that. They have security.”
They also have healthier bodies, ironically from being involved with chocolate. FL