Over the past 5 years we have been working with farmers across the Solomon Islands to establish trusted relationships and supply arrangements with the highest quality and most reliable farmers.
Our farmers on outer islands are supplied with GrainPro SuperGrainBags to ensure the beans they send are protected from seawater, rain and other contaminants such as smoke.
We have arrangements with the farmers so they don’t need to leave their families and farms to bring us their beans on the intra-island shipping, a round trip that can take a few weeks. They load their bags of cacao beans onto the ships and when the ships arrive from these islands, we pay the freight and then transport their beans to take to our storage facility where they are weighed and checked for moisture and quality, before being rebagged into export grade bags.
All beans are always stored within GrainPro hermetic storage, whether within SuperGrainBags or large indoor multi-tonne Cocoons. This hermetic storage protects against pests such as cocoa moths, reabsorption of moisture from the 85% ambient humidity and the modified CO2 atmospheric conditions also prevents growth of aerobic moulds.
We pay these farmers between 75% to 200% higher prices than the cacao price for the bulk commodity market in Honiara. The bulk market supplies cacao products for the big chocolate industry including Nestle and Cadbury.
We are currently supplying a number of high quality craft bean to bar chocolate makers in Australia including Ratio Cocoa Roasters (Melbourne), Atypic Chocolate (Melbourne), Smooth Chocolator (Geelong), Cailo Chocolate (Perth), Metiisto Chocolate (Toowoomba), Cuvee Chocolate (Victoria) and others.
European customers include Fabric Chocolate, Original Beans, Macao Movement, Misini Cokolada and others.
New Zealand customers include Wellington Chocolate Factory and Ocho.
Contact us to get latest prices and stock available.
Fermentation and drying protocols for most farmers are generally:
- Box fermentation – turned daily for 5 or 6 days, until beans are correctly fermented and tested via cut test
- Sundried or using solar bubble dryer – for 5 to 10 days, until correct moisture content (MC) of between 6.5-7.5% is reached
David Kebu (Guadalcanal) – Third place at International Cocoa Excellence Awards in 2015
Kenny Patovaki (Western Province) – First place at Solomon Islands Chocolate Week 2017 – Video here https://youtu.be/HUg-8_JXcnI
Lenard Nahurua (Makira) – First place at Solomon Islands Chocolate Week 2019
Biana Bana farmers co-operative (Makira) – Third place at Solomon Islands Chocolate Week 2019 – Video here https://youtu.be/LRJ60RL4fXQ
Black Post farmers co-operative (Guadalcanal)
Tenaru farners co-operative (Guadalcanal)
Agnes Pilopaso (Guadalcanal), second place at Solomon Islands Chocolate Festival 2016
Luz Kasimwane (Makira)
Jasper Iniga (Malaita)