Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  I’m an optimist. I hoped Sarpong would see the value at the top the cocoa value chain. I hoped he would feel a sense of national pride in showing the world that Ghana can do more than just grow cocoa—it can craft premium chocolate, too. I hoped that somewhere inside that clear-eyed, sober, process engineer lay a man of vision. I hoped he would turn out to be a risk-taker. However, I could see that, for his part, Sarpong hoped I would please give up already, take the next flight out of Accra, and leave him alone.

  Once the senior staff meetings adjourned, my real work would begin. I would make my way to the office of either the deputy managing director for confectionery or the marketing manager, and I would ask about trial production runs, milling specifications, melting points, tempering, and conching times. The staff seemed far more excited at the possibility of working with me, once the formality of the meeting was over. Getting out from under Sarpong’s watchful eye may have improved their moods, too. I sympathized with them.

  I had brought with me to Ghana recipes that I’d developed after reading an out-of-print copy of Cook and Meursing’s technical text Chocolate Production and Use, lent to me by David Rexford, the head pastry chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC. The book was heavy on math and melting points. Punching numbers into my calculator, I would devise recipes that I hoped would showcase the flavor of Ghana beans and yet retain some of the sweetness that Americans loved, an exercise in balancing ingredients and one that required running test batches on commercial equipment. It is one thing to create a bench sample and quite another to ramp up to full scale production runs where industrial machinery would affect the flavor and mouthfeel of the finished chocolate. I needed production workers who were part technicians and part artists who could tweak machinery, conching times, milling fineness, and temperatures to get the proper result.

  In the course of a few days in March 1993, we accomplished a great deal at the factory in Tema, and yet I returned to Accra feeling deflated. It was March 5, the day before the annual celebration of Ghana’s independence from Great Britain, and I knew that the entire country would now go on an extended holiday. I assumed we would lose all the momentum and focus enjoyed during the previous week.

  That night, back at my hotel, I received an unexpected call from K. B. Simpson, a deputy production supervisor assigned to the confectionery division. He asked me to meet with him over the weekend. “Could we continue to work on recipe development? I think you have brought us an amazing idea.” It was my first real breakthrough. I was bereft when, six months later, I learned that Simpson, not yet forty years old, had been killed in a car accident.

  Still, the Omanhene Idea had begun to find some purchase among a handful of the employees. After Simpson’s death, C. S. Otoo, a junior quality-assurance technician, took up the mantle of championing the Omanhene cause. In time, Otoo would rise to become managing director of the entire factory.

  By October 1993, we started running production samples based on a handshake agreement. The early batches were good—but not nearly good enough to compete globally. In April 1994, we signed a formal production agreement to work together. My fifty-page legal document was a complete nonstarter insofar as any government ministry was concerned, but I wanted some legal protections. I took a different tack and tried to align the economic interests of my company with Portem and those of the Ghanaian government’s Cocoa Board. The Ghana Cocoa Board owns outright all the cocoa assets in the country, save the farms themselves; these assets include a cocoa research station, perhaps the top cocoa agronomy facility in the world. The government has a monopoly to buy every bean from every farmer, weighing and grading the beans and transporting them to port; another government company markets the cocoa abroad, and so on. The government is a vertical monopolist in the cocoa sector, a tidy scheme to keep foreigners, presumably huge multinational cocoa companies with superior market knowledge, from exploiting Ghana’s 750,000 cocoa-farming families. As frustrating as the system can be for an outsider, I admit it achieves a favorable result most of the time, assuring consistently high quality and therefore securing top prices on the global commodity markets.

  I wanted to share both the risk of investment and the upside of profits, and I could do that only by linking Omanhene’s long-term interests (profits and investments) to those of the Ghana Cocoa Board and Portem. Such an arrangement would be far preferable to arguing annually over the price of cocoa beans. But I was compelled to keep things simple. The litigious reputation of US lawyers had preceded me, and intimidating legal documentation had not helped my cause. Not at-TALL. I distilled my fifty-page memorandum of understanding to the essence of the deal—a contract that ran a page and a half.

  We signed the agreement in early 1994, nearly four years after I first called Ghana’s Embassy in Washington, DC, to broach the subject of producing export-quality chocolate. I had been wandering for four years and feared I might be losing my way. Like so many others here, I was looking for answers. Perhaps this is the reason Ghana has so many churches.

  * * *

  With my signed contract, I drove back to Accra with Joshua. The Nissan Patrol stalled in traffic on the toll road leading out from Tema. Barefoot boys in cutoff pants and filthy T-shirts carried wooden trays of gum and handkerchiefs on their heads, spitting out a stream of chewing tobacco every so often as they made their way down the queue of traffic. Ahead of us, a diesel lorry farted copious clouds of dark smoke every time the driver put the engine in gear. Women with gap-toothed smiles balanced plastic trays of kenke on their heads, the warm balls of fermented corn paste wrapped in green palm fronds. We were waiting to pay the toll of ten pesewas, about two US pennies. It hardly seemed worth paying at all, hardly enough to pay the officials who collected this minimal amount. The line of cars and trucks crawled toward the single operable toll booth. There is still no electronic fare collection. As slowly as we were moving, the traffic was even worse on the alternative routes. Why didn’t the government charge five cedis (a couple of dollars) instead of ten pesewas? This likely would provide enough money to repair and expand this rut-filled toll road. I was getting tutored in yet another lesson in real-world economics. Many people will gladly pay a premium for better quality and superior service. Maybe not everybody, certainly. But many. The makola market women especially value time and gain nothing from sitting here in traffic. And doing things on the cheap is not sustainable—the toll road was crumbling. Time is money. No one was benefitting from sitting in this queue.

  Hardly anyone.

  A small boy came up with a bucket and a squeegee, and began to wash our windshield, hoping for a few pesewas.

  “Ei! What are you doing? Did I ask for this?” Joshua is banging on the windshield, now rolling down his window and sticking his neck outside to better berate the enterprising boy, all of twelve or thirteen years old.

  “Hey! I will not pay. I did not ask for this. Ei! Psssssss! Stop that now. Go away! I will come out right now and give you blows. Go away!”

  Joshua turned to me. “These small boys. Ei! I just don’t know. They are everywhere now. They should be in school. Ohhhhh, it is too bad. I don’t approve of this at-TALL. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

  The boy finished washing the windshield, put his thumb and fingers together, and touched his lips several times imploring us for some “chop money”—money to buy something to eat.

  Joshua waved him off violently, regaining his composure as he rolled up the window, face stoically forward. Joshua sighed loudly, embarrassed perhaps that I had seen the wretchedness of life on the tollway or embarrassed possibly at his own inability to control the situation or simply just plain tired of sitting in traffic with me. He reached down gingerly, eyes fixed on the road ahead, slowly turning the radio knob, seeking the spiritual solace of Reverend Ike’s Tower of Power ministry, while a choir of lorry engines idled around us.

  Progress, I thought. Well, at least we’re not going backward.

  Agor bε sa, efiri anpa.

  If the dance wil
l be delightful, it is so from the morningtide.

  “If one will succeed in business, it becomes apparent in the beginning.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Fancy Food Show

  Working with chocolate is a frantic race against time. You have a small window, just a few unforgiving minutes, when you can dip a strawberry so that the chocolate adheres perfectly and dries within seconds to a hard, glistening shell. Dip too soon, and the chocolate never properly sets; the cocoa liquor will separate from the cocoa butter, the butter forming diaphanous paisley swirls, like the marbled endpapers of an eighteenth-century book. Wait too long, and the chocolate becomes thick, loses its ability to flow, and becomes an unworkable paste. On the molecular level, there are at least six types of crystals that can potentially form as warm chocolate slowly cools to room temperature, in the process known as tempering. Only one crystal type results in a perfect chocolate coating, with the requisite snap and sheen. In other words, 83 percent of the time—five times out of six—your chocolate is destined to fail, unless you are vigilant with your thermometer and a virtuoso with your spatula. It’s all about timing. You need patience as you slowly turn and fold your chocolate as it cools, turn and fold, waiting, waiting, waiting … before you strike.

  I had been patient; perhaps too patient. Money was on my mind. More than usual. The year was 1994, and my twins were now three years old. I’d borrowed against the cash value of a life-insurance policy my grandfather bought for me when I was born—roughly $13,000—to start this verkakte Ghanaian chocolate business. And I had poured even more money into the project over the course of the last four years, money that should have gone to a college fund for the twins, a retirement fund for my wife and me, or any number of other rational, adult-minded investments. There is an adage in gambling: “If you can’t tell who the mark is at the poker table, it just might be you.” The same goes for business. You spend so much effort trying to convince an indifferent world of the ingenuity and value of your idea that you actually begin to believe your own hype. You must believe it. And yet, maybe, just maybe, that indifferent world knows a thing or two. Maybe you are the mark at the poker table.

  Inexplicably, I felt I was making progress. Of course, I was frustrated after spending the previous four years in all those meetings, waiting for approvals, waiting for permissions, and then waiting some more, explaining my case to anyone who might listen. I was running out of patience, and while my wife rarely mentioned it, Linda was, too. We were now in the throes of intensive recipe development, running production samples on the main manufacturing line. Getting closer to be sure, but the fact remained: we had slipped into our fourth year of product development. A firm launch date was nowhere in sight.

  The Fancy Food Show, sponsored by the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT), is the largest food exhibition in North America, and it fills every pavilion of the sprawling Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. I decided this would be the place to debut our chocolate.

  The year before, I attended the show to see whether anyone else was manufacturing chocolate at origin, as I intended to do. Not one company made this claim. We could be the first mover. My goal in exhibiting was less about selling my chocolate than it was to capture the notice of the New York Times. Then I could build a marketing campaign with some legitimacy; I could almost see the words before me: “Omanhene, as noted in the New York Times.” And the food writer I most wanted to meet was Florence Fabricant, the doyenne of the Times’ Food Section.

  I added up the costs of attending. The amount quickly exceeded $10,000. What would my money buy? The smallest available ten-by-ten-foot exhibition booth, along with a table for samples and literature, table skirting, one-color signage, hotels, airfare, food, and drayage, the costs of union labor to bring your samples from the loading dock to your booth.

  The next Fancy Food Show would run July 10–13, 1994. If I wanted to exhibit, I would have to commit soon to payment of the registration fee. The foliage on my decision-making tree was sparse. On the positive side was the chance to preempt any competitors and to lay claim to being the first to market single-bean chocolate bars manufactured at origin. As for the negatives, I had yet to perfect the Omanhene chocolate recipe. Manufacturing was proving extraordinarily difficult. I had roughly ten weeks before the show opened and, truth be told, I didn’t have anything close to a finished chocolate bar to debut. At the Portem factory, Dr. Sarpong (I hadn’t yet discerned what his doctorate was for—clearly not punctuality) displayed little interest in meeting deadlines or devoting much attention to perfecting the recipe. I phoned the NASFT looking for—I wasn’t sure what. At the very least, I wanted to confirm how late they would allow me to send in my reservation. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money. I weighed this investment as if it were my twins’ very future. In so many ways, it was.

  To my surprise, I got a call directly from the president of the NASFT, John Roberts. Add this to the many unexpected, fortuitous examples of goodwill that seemed to fall my way the longer I worked on Omanhene, encouraging me when I most needed a boost. Still, I couldn’t help wondering why I could persuade John Roberts of the ingenuity of our business model, and yet I struggled mightily to gain purchase with anyone in Ghana. What was I doing wrong?

  Roberts told me that, if I decided to exhibit, the NASFT would give me a second booth for free in its International Pavilion, since the organization wanted to showcase as many foreign exhibitors as possible, and they had precious few from Africa. Big fish, small pond wins again. The offer was tempting. Recalling my visit to the Fancy Food Show the previous year, I realized I had two challenges. First, I didn’t have enough people to staff two booths. I have one wife and one brother; together we comprised the entirety of Omanhene’s sales staff in 1994. More importantly, the International Pavilion was the pariah aisle at the previous year’s Fancy Food Show, set at the far end of the cavernous Javits Center. It looked like a souk, but without the Levantine charm. Booth after booth of exhibitors from the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent sat behind unadorned tables, with unimaginative presentations consisting almost entirely of open jute sacks containing various strains of rice and lentils. Earnest family members—for they all seemed to be family businesses—with two generations of ownership looking expectantly down the aisle, ready to cajole any attendee naive enough to make their way down the naked corridor. The Africa portion of this International Aisle was as far from the Fancy Food Show’s high-end real estate as was possible to get.

  I was trying to brand Omanhene as an upscale chocolate, and I wanted to be next to the Swiss, Belgian, and French chocolatiers. I wanted to differentiate my product as boldly as possible: we manufacture at origin, and therefore our chocolate is markedly fresher. But for the moment, my concern was not the amount of space I’d get, it was whether I could afford any space at all. My voice sounded foreign to me. “John, thank you very much for your consideration, but one booth, in the premium chocolate section, if possible, will be enough.”

  I hung up the phone, pulled out our checkbook, and handwrote a check to reserve a single ten-by-ten booth.

  May Linda and my children forgive me.

  * * *

  “Five plus two plus one,” I said to myself. This was the remorseless math dictating how long it takes to ship a container of chocolate bars: five weeks by sea from Ghana to Algeciras, Spain, and then on to the United States; two weeks to clear customs and undergo possible FDA inspection; and one week to transport the container from the Eastern Seaboard of the US to Milwaukee. Five plus two plus one; eight weeks total. Time was not my friend.

  I had purchased an insulated, reusable shipping container the size of a large microwave oven so that we could safely transmit chocolate samples via airfreight. It had four inches of Styrofoam custom-formed to fit inside a heavy-duty plastic shell, with metal corner protectors and custom-built belts and buckles to assure it wouldn’t open accidentally. It was crafted like a magician’s stage prop; indeed, it made
money disappear. The box cost several hundred dollars. The airfreight to send this insulated carton to Ghana and back exceeded the monthly mortgage payment on my house. Until we got the recipe right, we would be sending this box back and forth, back and forth, for however long it took….

  Just ten weeks before the Fancy Food Show, the latest chocolate samples arrived via DHL from the factory. I hoped for signs of progress. I double-checked the cover letter stating the ingredients of this trial batch and noting that the samples inexplicably contained vanillin, which had never been specified in my recipe. I never wanted any sort of artificial flavors or ingredients. Further, the factory changed my requested percentage of cocoa liquor by one-tenth of 1 percent. I unwrapped the bar and broke it in two. The chocolate didn’t snap as it should; it crumbled. The aroma seemed off. I could smell the vanillin. The taste was unbalanced, the texture poor. I wrote a letter to Mr. Sarpong, explaining that I’d already committed to the printing of 180,000 labels, and the labels do not include vanillin on the FDA-mandated ingredient list because, damn it, my recipe had never included vanillin. It wasn’t just a matter of ego or taste at this point, it was a matter of law. It is illegal to misrepresent information on a food label. I could go to jail. “Dear Dr. Sarpong,” I began.

  Half an hour after sending my letter by fax, I receive a frantic phone call from Sarpong. He was agitated, yelling into the phone, and his heavy accent rendered him difficult to understand. The static and poor connection did not help. It was clear, however, that he was angry; he received my letter. I was angry, too.

  “Ei, what are you doing? Please address all correspondence to ‘The Managing Director.’ Or ‘Sir.’ Never use my name. What are you doing this for? Oh, this is toooo bad.” Sarpong hung up the phone. Bewildered, I realized Sarpong’s rhetorical jujitsu had left me metaphorically flat on my back, looking up at the ceiling, with Sarpong’s foot on my throat. Sarpong had turned my frustration back on me. He contrived something so he could be mad at me. I made a rookie mistake. I am to correspond with the Office of the Managing Director rather than the individual who inhabits that office—to assure that there is no whiff of personal favoritism or bribery involved.