Corby Kummer praises the business practices of Tcho, a chocolate company:
What sets Tcho apart from other chocolate makers is that it doesn’t just scout the equator looking for cacao farmers it can admire, hoping they’ll grow great beans that might make wonderful chocolate. The company does something new: it provides growers with all the tools they need to have chocolate tastings during harvesting and processing, the crucial period that determines the price a cacao farmer’s crop will command. Tcho combines coffee roasters, spice grinders, and modified hair dryers to equip “sample labs”—pilot plants that produce tiny lots of chocolate right where cacao is grown. The company gives cacao farmers customized groupware so that they can share tasting notes and samples with chocolate makers. In this way, the farmers can bring entire harvests up to the standards of Tcho or any other buyer.
This is a huge change. Just as some coffee growers have never drunk coffee made from their beans, some cacao growers in remote areas have never tasted chocolate made with theirs. (Since chocolate is much harder to make than coffee, some may have never tasted chocolate at all.)
James Wimberley zooms out:
We often underestimate the importance and the difficulty of ensuring that markets have good information about quality as well as price. A price has one dimension; even a simple product like a carrot has at least six dimensions of quality – weight, size, shape, colour, crunchiness, sweetness, acidity. (Carrot connoisseurs will add some more dimensions of flavour.) A complex product like a car or wine has dozens of qualitative dimensions. Some of these can be assessed intuitively with sufficient accuracy, like the carrot’s crunchiness; others measured, like the car’s turning circle. But in many cases we have poor intuitive judgement, like the comparative weight of bags of staple foods; and in others measurement is problematic, like the bouquet of a wine.
A well-functioning market has to address these problems, and they are not easy – and only some are reliably self-regulating.
The Dish 