Weave Cacao is moving mountains across the Pacific one chocolate drop at a time.

words Hayley Barnett

Oonagh Browne is passionate about two things: Chocolate and change.

After 18 years in the chocolate industry, she’s come to realise that although good things take time, change in her world is now somehow more stagnant than ever.

For the past four years, Oonagh has been working on the ground with farming communities across the Pacific, to help improve the lives of cacao farmers in the region. What she found is 2.5 million lifelong farmers still living in poverty, even with many providing “fairtrade” cacao beans. Some communities have been harvesting beans for more than 100 years without ever trying their own cacao.

“Many farmers in the Pacific have no idea what they're actually growing,” says Oonagh. “They drink Milo – a real treat – without even realising their contribution to it.”

So Oonagh decided to take matters into her own hands by creating Weave Cacao, a business designed to create a paradigm shift in chocolate production that’s centred on empowering these communities.

“We want to show what's possible all the way through, from planting to manufacturing, in providing a volume, ethical chocolate out into the market,” she explains. “For hundreds of years farmers were taught how to grow the beans and how to put the beans in a sack to be shipped, but when a farmer takes their beans down to the wharf to sell, they get a different price depending on the Stock Exchange that day. They are the people who make the least money and we want to change that, not to handhold, but to give them fair pricing and a connection to their crops.”

Right now, New Zealand has a budding craft chocolate industry, but even as it grows most chocolate makers are only using 10 to 15 sacks of beans per year, not nearly enough to sustain the Pacific’s farming communities.

“I knew that we had to do something very different to be able to make true volume impact, while staying completely authentic in our ethos,” explains Oonagh.

Her vision of creating couverture chocolate – a chocolate that contains a higher percentage of cocoa butter than most chocolate on the market – was starting to come together, but the challenge was in providing the stability, pricing and education needed to uplift the quality required for production.

Lucky for Oonagh, the right people miraculously came together and Weave Cacao took off within a year. “We've moved mountains,” she says.

At the Pacific Cacao and Chocolate Show in Auckland in 2022, Oonagh presented the grim realities of the chocolate industry to the many companies who attended and pushed the need for change. Within just a few days, Mike and Simone of Raglan Chocolate called her and asked what they could do to help. Together the three created a vision for a couverture chocolate they knew would make a real impact.

Then Oonagh asked her friend Donna, a fellow Edmund Hillary Fellowship member, to guide them in forming the company. Donna fell in love with the idea and soon became the fourth member and shareholder of the team.

The problem now was raising enough money to purchase the equipment required to make couverture chocolate from the whole cacao bean. On one of her working trips to Papua New Guinea, Oonagh rang the team and said, “How about we produce here in Port Moresby [the capital] at the Paradise Foods chocolate factory? The equipment is old, but I know with our skills, we can do it.” Everyone agreed, and so Mike and Oonagh got to work on the recipe development.

The end result was fluid, flavourful and ready for market. There was just one more step to get through – the branding.

On a visit to Raglan for a team meeting, Donna invited another Edmund Hillary fellow to join them for lunch: Tesh Randall, founder of Raglan Food Co and The Values Trust. Amazingly, Tesh had a dream of being part of a purpose-led chocolate company, and when the conversation turned to branding, sales and marketing – Tesh’s specialty – she jumped at the chance to be involved. And so the fifth member and shareholder was in place, completing the talented team. They now had a chocolate brand with a difference.

“There wasn’t a premium quality couverture chocolate in the baking aisles at home, so we wanted to really encourage bakers, chefs and cafés to buy more volume quality chocolate,” says Oonagh. “In New Zealand we don't have the tradition of using quality chocolate at home or within the food industry.”

But, though they had a quality product, they needed to make sure their main aim of helping the farmers came to fruition. The team set up a charitable trust called Ū Cacao Trust, which currently owns 26 percent of the social enterprise and aims to take over the business in the coming years. They set this up as a way to ensure profits will always go back into the pockets of the farming communities.

Says Tesh: “The goal is for the trust to buy us out. Over time, the founders will essentially transfer ownership to the farmers, which I think is very unique and really beautiful – the thought of all the profits ending up in their hands. Then we just become an advisory board, helping them to keep it growing.”

It’s a big dream, but the team truly believe they have the power to do it, by inspiring others to do the same.

“We do believe we can change the chocolate industry,” says Oonagh. “Fairtrade is not enough. Our branding is about uplifting and inspiring the consumer. Not to point fingers, but a lot of people don’t realise that some of these big, apparently ‘fairtrade’ companies have been sold off to large corporations.

“With transparency all the way through, we will make a real change for farming communities and show everyone what is truly possible.”

Right now the focus is on Papua New Guinea, with an eye on the rest of the Pacific in the coming years.

“We've been working in the Solomon Islands and just kicked off Vanuatu, so while it’s only Papua New Guinea beans for now, we will be growing,” says Oonagh.

Lasting change, she says, is just around the corner. “Our main aim is to lift cacao farmers out of poverty all over the Pacific.”

weavecacao.com