Forum Activity for @Ethan Mckenzie

Ethan Mckenzie
@Ethan Mckenzie
01/23/12 02:27:24
3 posts

When a Guide to Good May Not Be
Posted in: Opinion

Bill, thanks for coming on the boards and replying. I learned a lot from your post. I appreciate your position and I actually ran across your website probably a year ago and have used it from time to time. I think you guys do a great job with what you can reasonably do and I agree that most consumers don't have enough bandwidth to learn about each purchase they are planing. I suffer from bandwidth problems myself and yet I want people to look into their chocolate more. Hypocrisy I know.

Now that I own a smallish cacao farm I see the certifications in a different light. They are a cost in terms of time, money, resources that we just don't have. Nowhere do I get to brag about the fact we don't slash and burn or that we provide meals and housing for our workers as well as pay them a reasonable wage that is a good 30% higher than others. Or that we are developing a land owners program as a pension for our long term workers so that when they no longer can work with us they will own enough land to support their family. Anyways, I'm just venting my frustration that I'm sure many can share as many of us are small enough that certifications are a serious burden that I'm interested in pursuing but just can't at this point and still be able to treat our workers like we want to.

Sorry I took so long to reply and again i really appreciate your response on the boards. What is your take with the latest fair trade shenanigans?

Ethan

Ethan Mckenzie
@Ethan Mckenzie
01/08/12 15:32:21
3 posts

When a Guide to Good May Not Be
Posted in: Opinion

Clay thanks for highlighting the weakness of the certification programs. My partner and I own a cacao farm in Ecuador. We have gone back and forth on if we want to pursue fair trade certification/rain forest alliance. So far that answer has been no as we haven't needed it from a marketing standpoint so the hassle is not worth the time and money. I like the idea of a certificate to show that we are good citizens, treat our workers well, areenvironmentallyfriendly, etc etc. However I feel like many of them are so fundamentally flawed as to be worthless.

-Ethan

Ethan Mckenzie
@Ethan Mckenzie
11/27/11 10:18:48
3 posts

A list of material suppliers and some questions
Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

Hi everyone, I recently ran across this gem of a website and I was hoping for a bit of guidance.

First things first. I live in the bay area, near San Francisco California. When I was growing up I lived in Ecuador as an exchange student. My host brother and I are started a Cacao farm, about 16 hectares of Nacional.

I'm in the phase of trying to learn as much about this whole process as possible, I've been scouring the forums looking where people are sourcing their beans and such. So with that in mind; where do you all buy your raw materials?

I've run across a couple of websites but I don't know if these are the suppliers that people use.

http://www.cocoasupply.com

http://www.cacao-beans.com/

http://www.icamprofessionale.it/TMP_prodottiLista.php?&l=ENG&sc=3

http://www.cocoapodshop.com/products/Cocoa-Beans-%28450g-portion%29.html

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=cacao&x=0&y=0

who knew you could buy this stuff on amazon?

http://www.chocosphere.com/

I keep seeing posts saying they do wholesale sales of raw materials. Couldn't find anything on their website but thought I would them forcompletenesssake .

http://chocolatealchemy2.myshopify.com/products/peruvian-cocoa-ft-org-2011

http://www.ebay.com

this market doesn't seem to be thriving. No bids on anything that I saw.

I've listed all the websites I found. I didn't list everyone's individual contact information that I ran across as I would have quickly gotten bogged down. So this iseverything I've found going through every single post in this forum as well as using google. I'm sure I missed some.

Question 2.

Would you like to be able to have beans fermented to your specifications?

Question 3.

How important is having organic certification, fair trade, rain forest alliance to you? I guess what I'm really asking is what do you look for when you buy your raw materials?

Thanks everyone. Over the next 6 weeks I'll try and get some pictures up of what we are doing.

Sincerely,

Ethan


updated by @Ethan Mckenzie: 04/11/15 19:52:23