Grenada Cocoa Association | Valrhona Chocolate

Grenada

Saint George's
12°2’41.1”N
61°44’42.2”W

Agroforestry at the heart of the model

The Grenada Cocoa Association is a cooperative that brings together the majority of the island’s producers, who number about 3,000 families. Cocoa is cultivated in mixed-crop “creole” family gardens, using a local agroforestry model that combines cocoa with spice, nutmeg and clove crops, as well as fruit and vegetables. This is a real part of the social, cultural and familial fabric in this small Caribbean nation nicknamed “spice island”.

Founded in 1964, the Grenada Cocoa Association is the island’s only cocoa producer cooperative. It manages the nurseries created in 1948 by the Ministry of Agriculture, which imported cacao trees from the neighboring island of Trinidad and distributed them locally. The Association prepares its members’ cocoa (all of it Fairtrade-certified) in various collection centers.

A long-term partnership

Valrhona and the Grenada Cocoa Association signed a partnership in 2015. Together, we developed a cocoa preparation protocol that provides a very specific camphor-inflected aromatic product, to the great pride of the Association’s teams.

The Grenada Cocoa Association’s structuring role makes it an obvious partner for Valrhona, and the organization perpetuates traditional and family-based approaches to cocoa-growing in mixed-crop gardens, using agricultural practices that respect the environment. Today, Valrhona is a major partner to the Grenadian cocoa industry.

The Grenada Cocoa Association is organized around three collection centers:

The Carlton center’s building in Saint Andrew is a former factory built in the 1930s which once produced a local beverage. After being transformed into a social space where Grenadians would come to dance, the building later became the GCA’s cocoa collection, fermentation and drying center.
The Mount Horn center in Saint Andrew is the largest in Grenada, located at the foot of the island’s tallest peak of Mount Saint Catherine. It was built by a post-colonial former agricultural estate of the same name and divided into plots for small-scale farmers in the 1980s during the “Lands for the Landless” program.
The Diamond center in Saint Patrick is one of the oldest buildings on the island. It was originally built by French monks in 1774, but architecturally it is Victorian in style. The remains of an aqueduct and a water wheel hint at its past as a sugar plantation. The estate planted the island’s first cacao trees in 1863. Since 2014, Diamond has been home to the Jouvay chocolate factory, which is majority-owned by the Grenada Cocoa Association and can sell members’ cocoa on the local and tourist markets.