In “The Bitter and the Sweet of Craft Chocolate in the Global South” episode of Gravy, producer Sarah Holtz engages important voices in the complex conversation about ethical chocolate, from central Ghana to southern Missouri. 

In the chocolate world, terms like corporate sustainability and ethical sourcing are gradually entering the mainstream, but they remain a little vague. Holtz explores how direct trade and profit-sharing models offer alternatives to the practices of the largest chocolate companies in the world—Big Chocolate—which conceive of cocoa farmers not as partners, but as links in the supply chain.

In her reporting on labor in the chocolate industry, Holtz asks: How do you define ethical consumption? Is there such a thing? And—when you’re standing in the grocery aisle, gazing at a wall of options—how do you know which chocolate bar to choose?

To begin to address these questions and more, Holtz speaks with Kwabena Assan Mends, founder of Emfed Farms, a company that serves small cocoa farmers in central Ghana, especially those who are aging or have physical disabilities. She also talks to Shawn Askinosie and Lawren Askinosie of Askinosie Chocolate, and Scott Witherow of Olive & Sinclair, two vanguards of the craft chocolate movement. Finally, Megan Giller, food writer and author of Bean-To-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, weighs in on the history of the chocolate supply chain and upending a pattern of colonization.