It was love at first sight for Viviane Kouame when, as a teenager growing up in Ivory Coast, she first saw cocoa trees with ripe pods on their trunks that reminded her of babies clinging to their mothers’ backs.
She decided cocoa would be a part of her life, and in 2021 she set up her own company, Chocovi, to make and sell chocolate.
“I want to be the face of Ivorian chocolate,” said Kouame, a rare female entrepreneur in a male-dominated industry.
Photo: Reuters
Ivory Coast is the world’s top producer of cocoa beans, but the vast majority are exported and processed elsewhere, with Ivorians missing out on the added value.
Chocovi is one of only a small number of companies making chocolate locally. So far, Kouame and her five employees are processing about 2 tonnes of cocoa per year and selling it at stalls in malls in the commercial capital, Abidjan, but she is seeking investors to scale up.
She expresses her patriotism through her elaborate packaging, with some chocolate bars shaped like a map of Ivory Coast and others wrapped in paper decorated with images of the country’s beauty spots and cultural traditions.
Philomene Dable, a customer at a mall, was impressed with the product’s form and content.
“I tasted the chocolate, it’s pure, it’s natural,” she said, holding an elegant box wrapped in orange, white and green ribbons. “This box, with the national colors of Ivory Coast — it’s wonderfully presented. I love it.”
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
Hundreds of thousands of Guyana citizens living at home and abroad would receive a payout of about US$478 each after the country announced it was distributing its “mind-boggling” oil wealth. The grant of 100,000 Guyanese dollars would be available to any citizen of the South American country aged 18 and older with a valid passport or identification card. Guyanese citizens who normally live abroad would be eligible, but must be in Guyana to collect the payment. The payout was originally planned as a 200,000 Guyanese dollar grant for each household in the country, but was reframed after concerns that some citizens, including
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
RSS