Cadbury Going Aatmanirbhar?
Unless Cadbury interferes, India may lose chocolate forever. How? ReadOn to find out.
Isn’t chocolate one of the best gifts to mankind? Well, this gift was introduced to India by Cadbury (now: Mondelez).
Mondelez is the market leader in India. What makes it stay at the top is constant innovation. This time, Mondelez is looking to solve the problem of raw material (cocoa) sourcing in India within the next 10 years.
Currently, 70% of Mondelez’s raw material is imported and only 30% is produced in India. By reducing imports to 50%, the company plans to make a more robust and resilient supply chain (tweet this). To understand why it is a big deal, let’s trace back the roots of chocolate.
The heavenly taste of chocolate that releases all the happy hormones in our brain has not always tasted that way. It was only in the year 1847 that cocoa was fashioned as the modern chocolate bar for the very first time. Once cocoa’s true potential was unlocked, it became the universal favourite. And Africa became the source of it all, commanding two-thirds of the world’s total cocoa production. On the other hand, India’s climate is not best suited for cocoa and that is where the trouble lies for Mondelez.
The country yields 20,000 tonnes of cocoa per year as against 30,00,000 tonnes produced by West Africa. In order to encourage production, Mondelez currently spends Rs. 2 crores annually on cocoa research and farming. Even after all this effort, it achieved only 10-15% year-on-year growth of cocoa production, which is not sufficient to meet its targets. And well, as much as Cadbury is important for India, India is also important for Cadbury. The love is mutual.
Thus, it plans to go aggressive with its research in the top-most cocoa producing states of Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. It is said that climate change could spell doom and extinction for cocoa and chocolate. It will be a threat to an entire industry.
Can you imagine living in a world without chocolate?
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