A sweet deal
TOBY GARRITT tells Ajeng G. Anindita about his adventures in high-quality Indonesian chocolate
Think about chocolate and the first thing that comes up in almost everyone’s mind is sweetness. Yet the cacao fruit and its beans, from which chocolate is made, taste nothing like the chocolate bars we know so well. Sweetened chocolate didn’t appear until Europeans returned from America with cacao. Today, chocolate is one of the most popular ingredients in cuisines all around the world. It is used in so many recipes, and comes in all sorts of shapes and flavours. But although just about everyone enjoys eating chocolate, very few people know how it is produced or even where the plant comes from. Toby Garritt, who founded Pod Chocolate in 2010, had this epiphany when he visited Papua, one of the regions in Indonesia where cacao is grown. He was working with regional governments to rehabilitate and conserve Indonesian forests. It was then that he tasted his first cacao fruit, and the rest is history.
“Here I was in my adopted home of Bali and I saw cacao growing all around me, but nobody was making any chocolate with it,” Garritt says when Prestige visited Pod Chocolate’s main factory and outlet in Mengwi. “I decided to see whether it was possible to create high-quality chocolate using the local beans.” Born in Australia, Garritt moved to Indonesia in 2001. He opened his first boutique, Pod Origin, in 2013 and since then he has been growing his company to keep up with the ever-growing demand for his organically produced chocolate. In 2016, the company inaugurated a larger factory equipped with the latest machinery to produce world-class quality chocolate. The main factory and outlet were opened to the public in the following year. Garritt currently has three boutiques in Bali, and Pod products are retailed outside the island in selected supermarkets and at Starbucks.
How Pod Chocolate operates is quite different from industry norms. Chocolate farmers in Indonesia typically sell their produce to brokers, and then it goes to big factories in Java. The farmers are rarely paid well for their efforts and their trees become neglected as a consequence. More often than not, the farmers are disconnected from the process of making chocolate, as Garritt laments. “One of the most memorable moments for me was when I was working with our first farmers and I made the chocolate with their beans,” he recalls. “I took it back to the farms for them to try, and the look in their eyes was unforgettable. Believe it or not, they had been growing cacao for over 10 years and yet they had never tasted any chocolate made from their beans. It was a really emotional experience, and it gave me the confidence and motivation I needed to expand this business and to make an impact for the farmers.”
There are big challenges in the process of making chocolate. “The first is to work with the farmers to make sure they can grow high-quality cacao beans and achieve that standard consistently,” Garritt says. He introduces them to new composting techniques to improve soil and tree health, as well as to natural controls to tackle insects and other pests that attack the trees. They have done a lot of research and testing at the farms to reduce pest damage and increase production in a sustainable, organic way.
“We didn’t want to be paying farmers the higher price for their beans and then have them purchasing pesticides or herbicides,” Garritt says. “We want the farmers to get more money from the cacao to produce better cacao that we can use to make a great chocolate. So, the goal from the beginning is to have this win-win situation. We need the farmers to be successful in order for us to be successful. If we are successful together, we are going to have a great product and a great company.”
Describing how his company has grown, Garritt goes on: “By bringing the technology here, we are able to considerably shorten the supply chain from farm to factory. We are one of the few companies in the world that actually make chocolate together with the people who grow the cacao. I think the proof is in the flavour and right now, we are supported by a lot of hotels and restaurants in Bali, as well as having really loyal customers that choose our products over European chocolate. I think that’s a big success.”
Wrapping up our exclusive interview with him, Garritt speaks about his future plans as well as new products: “We have our new chocolate spread, and it is something that we have improved. We have the new version of that and it is going to be up soon. I’ve also got a range of different new chocolate bars that we’ve been developing, some unique single origin chocolate bars that will be released later this year. Our relationship with Starbucks is going to continue as well, to raise awareness that chocolate goes together with coffee. Meanwhile, we are investing in more machinery, increasing our capacity and moving into more international markets.”