Sustainability and the chocolate market

Posted by Zairo

Last spring, I took a class at MIT called “Sustainability Laboratory (S-Lab)” that gave me the chance to research sustainability in the chocolate market. Our class project was to research and analyze European markets to determine if they are attractive enough for U.S. companies to export to.

This project was very interesting because I was able to learn a lot about fair trade. Below is a chart showing the historic trend of the fair trade market in the UK. Even though coffee and bananas, which have relatively long histories as fair trade products, are a large part of the fair trade market, other categories, including chocolate, show stable growth.

Sales of fair trade certified products in the UK

The MIT teams used three criteria to evaluate the attractiveness of the fair trade chocolate market:
1.    Fair trade consumption per capita
2.    Chocolate consumption per capita
3.    Fair trade retail value of each country

We used the chart below to integrate these three criteria. On the X axis is chocolate consumption per capita. Countries with higher chocolate consumption have more attractive markets. On the Y axis is fair trade consumption per capita, which shows each country’s tendency toward fair trade products. Countries with higher fair trade consumption have more attractive markets. The bubble size denotes the fair trade retail value. Countries with larger bubbles have stronger potential to sell fair-trade-related products.

From the above chart, we found that the UK, Germany, and Switzerland are very attractive in the European market. However, we also found that the U.S. market is prominent and attractive and has substantial growth potential. This finding was surprising for me. I had thought European countries were far ahead of the U.S. in terms of sustainability, but it turns out there is already a large market for fair trade in the U.S. What I learned from this is that companies should not target their sustainability products only to European countries but to the U.S. market as well.

-Koji Omiya