Liberia’s Cacao Renaissance: A Chat with Lu Tolbert (part 2)
Welcome to the second part of our interview with Lu Tolbert, CEO of Liberia Cocoa Corporation. In this continuation, Lu provides further depth into Liberia’s Cacao production process, addressing key aspects such as moisture control, transportation challenges, and the importance of certification. The conversation delves into the intricacies of the Cacao cultivation journey, from drying and storage methods to workforce dynamics and the unique challenges faced by the plantations.
Lu also sheds light on Liberia’s efforts to overcome obstacles in infrastructure, financing, and technical expertise, aiming to establish itself as a high-quality Cacao origin nation. Stay tuned for a detailed exploration of Liberia’s Cacao industry and its vision for a positive global impact.
Lu Tolbert:
We dry the beans down to around 7%. The international standard is 8% but we dry it down to 7% because we like to store the beans for a longer period of time. It’s better to do it when they are a little bit drier. So at the farm site, once they’re dried, they’re put into jute bags and then they’re transported down by truck to Monrovia, where the facility is. Once it gets down to the facility, we transfer the cocoa beans into Grain Pro Bags. Grain pro bag is like a giant Ziploc bag. It holds about 50 kg of cocoa beans. It’s hermetically sealed so you cannot get any bug in there, you cannot get any moisture in there. It’s directly sealed off from the air. So in this environment, you can store the bag with the cocoa, up to maybe two years without changing the moisture content.
Justyna:
Up to two years! And all because it’s hermetically sealed and this special technology of the Grain pro bags?
Lu Tolbert:
Correct, that is why. So a lot of the cocoa that’s kept in warehouses, especially in the communities, ends up getting a high mold content and that’s because of the moisture in their environment. Air and heat is going through the regular jute sacks in which cocoa beans are being transported in. If you keep it for 2-3 months like that, if there’s a problem with the road, it could reach 15-16% moisture content.
Justyna:
So you start from 7% as they are already dried and then after a few months of improperly storing, let’s call it like that, it goes up to 15% of moisture.
Lu Tolbert:
It could go even higher than that, depending on the environment. And once it gets into that double digit, that’s when the mold can develop and the mold will develop on the outside first, but then it will seep into the bean. So you have a problem with mold. There are other things that can happen to your beans too. It can also get infected with bugs.
Justyna:
Even if a bit of the stored cocoa beans are getting moldy, the rest are also in danger. Mold is like fungi, so it’s spread all over. It doesn’t stay just in one place.
Lu Tolbert:
Correct. So to avoid us falling into that trap, I ordered these Grain Pro Bags which we currently use, and it keeps the moisture content. We have a moisture meter so we can accurately test the moisture of the bean. And we see that it’s either the same or maybe 0.1% different from what we put it on. So we mark the date and the moisture at the time when the beans are put into the bags, and then we can track it later on to see if there’s any change in the moisture content while it’s already in the bag. The only time you get a problem is if perhaps you don’t properly seal the bag. But besides that, they work very well.
Justyna:
So with that being said, once you take care of the fermented dried beans that way, then when you have an order for, let’s say, a pallet of cocoa liquor, then you grab the bag and you can go to the facility where you can proceed for the liquor.
Lu Tolbert:
Yes. So everything is stored and it’s being preserved. So if an order comes in for one ton cocoa liquor, you get your beans, you roast them and you winnow them, and then you put them into the pre grinder, which creates the flakes, nibs. And then you put the flakes into the ball mill and then that ball mill would turn it into the cocoa liqueur. You take that out and then you have your product there.
Justyna:
Perfect. Sounds yummy. That’s the information I was looking for. That was my interest, how exactly it looks like in Liberia. And one more question about the production itself. How many people work during all this process? Do you have assigned workers for the fermentation boxes, for the drying, or do they shift or what does it look like? It’s also interesting.
Lu Tolbert:
Yes. So we have about maybe two people for the fermentation who turn it and load the cocoa into the boxes. And then we have one of those same two people to observe the drying process. So two people can manage, I would say, 15 boxes because you have the record keeping.
Justyna:
Yeah. You need to be very precise with time and temperature and everything. So they need to keep the notes correct.
Lu Tolbert:
Yes. So there’s only two people there when we are doing the post harvest. But for the harvesting, the pod breaking, you need a lot more people. Usually when we do that, we have up to 30 women who are doing that exercise. We have a motorized tractor where when they harvest the pods, that tractor takes it back to the centralized fermentation so they can continue doing the harvesting for that day. And then the beans are kept overnight the next morning. Then the breaking is all done manually. The breaking happens and then you want to break everything that same day. So it immediately goes into the fermentation box and the process starts then.
Justyna:
And you mentioned that after collecting the fruits that are already ripe, the pods are being stored for one day before they will be break open. Is there a reason for that?
Lu Tolbert:
The reason for that is the beans inside can start to disengage from the placenta inside of the cocoa pod. So it gets easier to separate the beans from the placenta once you break them. And also you don’t want to keep it longer because if you do, then the beans could start to germinate inside the cocoa pod. You will have a stem coming out the root.
Justyna:
It seems like time is precious here with every step of the process, starting with collecting the pods, then breaking it open. It is a very precise process, working with Cacao.
Lu Tolbert:
Yes, it is. And every step is equally as important to the next one. So you have to just do things on time. Once you get the sequencing right, then everything will be okay. But you could do everything right and then you don’t store your cocoa beans correctly and then you have the same problem.
Justyna:
I had a few questions from Cacao Lovers asking, what do you do with the pods after breaking them? Do you just simply throw it away or do you compost it?
Lu Tolbert:
Yeah, so once you do that, we usually compost them. We dig a basic hole and then we put them in there and we can keep them there for like three to four months. And then we can use them as natural, organic fertilizer for the cocoa trees. Yeah, they break down quite nicely. Some people use them to make other materials like paper and different things like that. But yeah, that’ll be too difficult for us. I think you need a much larger volume than what we produce in order.
Justyna:
I was wondering, is cocoa so popular in Liberia? Because you mentioned that you’ve got the seeds from Ghana. So was it brought over to Liberia to plant and to check if the soil will be suitable for it? Or was the cocoa over there already and you just started the company and the program? What does it look like?
Lu Tolbert:
We decided to get higher quality cocoa that is called hybrid cocoa. Liberia, I’m not sure if you know the history of Liberia, but there was a protracted civil war here from 1989 to 2003. But the decline started as early as 1980. So the capacity for Liberia to produce cocoa beans through research was stopped. So in terms of the science of cocoa, that has stopped here. The country was quite advanced in all of these types of agriculture prior to the unrest that happened in 1980. So from that time until 2003, all of that was lost, not just for cocoa, but for rubber, oil, pump and everything. So I decided to go to Ghana because Ghana has a very good international research center where they do a lot of work on cocoa cultivation. Ghana is the world’s number two producer of cocoa, followed by Ivory Coast. So I had been getting cocoa seeds for some of the projects that I was working with some of the smallholder farmers, and I saw that they were doing quite well in the field. So it was through the same idea I decided to get the cocoa from Ghana to use on the plantation, to establish the plantation.
So they would harvest in Ghana, let’s say on a Tuesday, and then they would put it in boxes with sawdust and send it to me on a Wednesday the following day. And then I’ll receive that and then drive directly to the farm where we would already have the nursery prepared pollutant bags filled with the topsoil so we could plant each individual seed in the nursery. So that’s how we did it. It came on air cargo from Ghana and drove up and then placed in the bag. They usually germinate within one week. They’re kept in the nursery for probably between four to six months, and then you transplant them into the field where they’re going to be.
Justyna:
Wow. And it worked perfectly because I don’t know if there is a big difference between the climate in Ghana and Liberia.
Lu Tolbert:
Yes, it did. Cocoa typically grows between ten degrees north and south of the equator. So, yes, we have the climate, we have the soil to produce cocoa here.
Justyna:
Okay. And what would you say were the biggest obstacles for the plantations?
Lu Tolbert:
Okay, so I would say probably road access was the first one traveling to that area of the country. Sometimes the roads are not maintained as well as they should. It’s still a problem today, although they’re working on the network, the main artery that connects the central town to the city where we have our particular farm. That road is maybe only 200 km, but it takes about 7 hours, almost 8 hours to get there.
Justyna:
Because of the state of the road.
Lu Tolbert:
Correct. So the road is being redone, but it’s still going to be a couple of years before it’s completed, so there’s a lot of maintenance that needs to take place. Trucks go on that road, small cars go on the road. Sometimes they get stuck and then nobody can pass for days or weeks, depending on what happens on the road. Sometimes the truck turns sideways or it tips over and you need to get another truck or crane to lift it. So those are things that create challenges for us in this particular project.
Another challenge: especially during the establishment phase, access to finance was a little bit challenging because here in Liberia, we don’t have a lot of financing for agriculture long term facilities, as you do in other countries. Even in Ghana and Ivory Coast, they have agricultural banks that finance things for a longer period of time in line with what you’re growing here. We don’t have that. So what happens here is commercial loans, which are usually twelve to 18 months, and you can’t really use that for agriculture. So a lot of the smallholder farmers cannot really benefit from using loans as they do in Ghana based on their production each year. It doesn’t work that way. The third concern challenge we have experienced is the technical know-how of people in cocoa cultivation, cocoa management.
A lot of people here in Liberia don’t know modern cocoa best practices. So it’s difficult to find someone who has the requisite knowledge in how to manage and maintain a cocoa farm with hybrid seed. So we were relying on internationals to come in here to do that, which is also very expensive. But now we have quite a few of them, quite a few individuals who are quite well versed in cocoa, good agricultural practices, but there’s still not many that we have here in the country. So that’s another limiting factor.
Justyna:
And I suppose that neither the education for the farmers is supported by any governmental party or whoever is responsible for agriculture. So it’s also like a vicious circle. You would like to educate people, but there is a financial obstacle, am I right?
Lu Tolbert:
Yes, absolutely. You’re 100% right on that. That is a major issue here in the country.
Justyna:
So you mentioned the certification for the Cacao, like the organic certification. And because nowadays it’s necessary if you want to go worldwide with your product for the product to be certified. So what kind of requirements do you need to fulfill in order to get the certification? Just briefly, what are they checking for?
Lu Tolbert:
Yes, so what they’re checking for is really to see if you have a system of traceability in your cocoa production. Of course, they check to see whether you don’t use any non approved chemicals on your farm. Also that will go into the farms, which could get into the cocoa bean. And there’s a test that is done to confirm whether or not there are any chemicals in the bean. Very sophisticated tests they can do on that. But what they’re really looking at is the system just to make sure that you are in charge or monitoring each level within your own internal value chain to get the cocoa bean from the farm to the port and to your buyer that there’s no other cocoa being introduced into that particular chain.. So it’s pretty much documentation and record keeping and database that’s being reviewed.
Justyna:
And I know it may be a controversial question, but I’ve got it a lot and it made me think that a lot of people in Europe think that African countries are not so developed and stuff like that. That’s why these questions appear very often. What about child labor?
Lu Tolbert:
I knew that was a question. I was just waiting for it.
In Liberia, we don’t have issues really with child labor because Liberia doesn’t produce cocoa on the scale as they do in Ivory Coast and Ghana, for example. One of the things that we do to make sure that doesn’t happen is that we keep records of the farmers, their demographics, their age, their location, the size of their farm, their community name, their town name, all of those different things. And we monitor on a regular basis. So we have not experienced any child labor. I have not experienced any child labor since I have been here in Liberia going to various farms. And again, I equate child labor with keeping the child away from school to work on the farm, yes, on a regular basis. So I have not seen that. I have not seen many children on the farm doing any work whatsoever. So we don’t really have much of a problem with that here in Liberia..
Justyna:
Thank you for answering. And what else I think I’ve got the last question. What would you like people to know about Liberia? About the economics or the way of living or what do people get confused with when they hear Liberia? I just think it’s good to spread awareness about our own country. So what would you like people to know about Liberia?
Lu Tolbert:
That’s a good question! A lot of people associate Liberia in a negative context around the world because that is the press that they have been most accustomed to receiving. They think of child labor. They think of child soldiers because we had an issue with that during one of the wars I told you about from 1989 to 2003. We have also been associated with Ebola. That was all over the news. So war, disease. We have the famous ex-president, Mr. Charles Taylor, who was quite a lot in the news. But those are the negative highlights that people may equate with Liberia, but the country itself has a lot of potential. And that’s the part I want to showcase to your customers so that they understand that this is a new country in terms of cocoa origin. It’s a new cocoa origin nation that is focusing on high quality, lower volume cocoa for the export market. And we’re putting a lot of these mechanisms in place. I told you that I don’t know if you remember my presentation, but I said there were four companies that are currently undergoing organic certification.
We are also getting onto the organic networks, international networks, so we are represented in meetings where organic matters are being discussed. This is something that hasn’t happened in the history of the country.
Justyna:
So you’re writing a new history here.
Lu Tolbert:
Correct, which will be focused on exporting high quality products, whether it be finished products, semi finished products, or raw materials to the export market.
As we conclude this engaging conversation, our dialogue with Lu Tolbert extends beyond the interview. The anticipation builds for our future collaboration, including the exploration of new Cacao samples and an exciting visit to Liberia. Our goal is to immerse ourselves in the local Cacao dimension, fostering a deeper connection with the farmers and bringing you firsthand updates from the heart of the cacao industry.
We value your feedback and invite you to share specific areas of interest, ensuring that the information we bring to you remains not only informative but tailored to your curiosity.