57 Chocolate

Kimberly and Priscilla Addison were living in Switzerland when they took a tourist's factory tour at Maison Cailler and worked out the arithmetic that started the company: Switzerland is a chocolate nation that grows no cocoa, and much of what it does use comes from Ghana. They launched '57 Chocolate in Accra in April 2016, naming it for 1957, the year of Ghanaian independence. Production began domestically in the most literal sense, with beans hand-sorted and roasted in their mother's oven before the operation moved to its own premises. The house buys from local farmers and works bean-to-bar, keeping additives out; alongside plain bars it makes dark and milk chocolate chips and small bars moulded with Adinkra symbols, the sign system of the Ashanti. The obscurity is structural rather than accidental. West and Central Africa supply roughly seventy per cent of the world's cocoa and almost none of the finished chocolate, so the category '57 occupies barely exists as an export trade. Priscilla Addison put the founding problem plainly: "We rarely find any made-in-Ghana goods and that's very disturbing to us." A maker solving that problem sells, first and mostly, at home.