Grenada Chocolate Company

The Grenada Chocolate Company began in 1999 when three men had a radical idea for producing sustainable, small-batch chocolate bars. Mott Green, Doug Browne and Edmond Brown founded and partnered with the Organic Cocoa Farmers and Chocolate-Makers Cooperative, ultimately creating the first “Tree-to-Bar” chocolate.

The founders worked with small cocoa farmers in Grenada and as many as 50 factory employees, all of whom earned the same salary. They dried cocoa beans in the sun, built, maintained and powered the machinery to make chocolate, packaged the finished product, and cobbled together an international network of distributors.

Over the years, Mr. Green set out to address the human rights and child labor issues typically associated with large scale chocolate production by dealing directly with small growers and by keeping the processing and packaging of chocolate within Grenada. In the process, he appears to have created the only chocolate-making company in this cocoa-producing country.

The Grenada Chocolate Company is just a house, painted in bold Caribbean colors, across the street from the prime minister’s modest residence. The only differences are the solar panels and a huge home-made solar dryer where bananas are dried. In 2012, the company delivered tens of thousands of chocolate bars to Europe on a sail-powered Dutch ship. A team of volunteer cyclists in Amsterdam helped handle distribution on the ground. It was called “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.”

The following year, Mr. Green passed away in an electrical accident while working on solar-powered machinery for cooling chocolate during overseas transport. Edmond Brown is the sole surviving founder, and continues to be responsible for making chocolate every day.