Fine-chocolate exporter builds fame on remote African island

Claudio Corallo is a reluctant celebrity as Africa’s only maker and exporter of fine chocolate.

His delicacies sell at $26.50 for a 5.6-ounce box in Palo Alto, Calif., in a shop a stone’s throw away from a Louis Vuitton store that sells handbags from $1,200. But he eschews trade shows, labeling or fancy packaging, and insists on calling himself an agronomist.

“I’m not a chocolatier,” said Corallo, 63, who wears faded jeans cut off at the knee and a tiny pocket knife dangling on a string from his belt. “The fact that I’m making chocolate is completely accidental.”

Corallo, a native of Florence in Italy, grows cocoa and transforms it into high-quality bars in the small West African nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, an archipelago that was the world’s biggest cocoa producer in 1908.

Very few companies worldwide control the entire process from the harvest to the final product, and almost all that do are based in South America. Corallo is unique on the continent that produces 73 percent of global cocoa-bean supply, and barely any chocolate.

“In West Africa, cocoa is purely a business, with the involvement of big companies like Nestlé and Mondelez, which focus on yields and volume rather than quality,” said Lee McCoy, an economist and founder of Chocolatiers, a web-based shop that sells premium-quality chocolate in the U.K. “Claudio Corallo is an exception; he does it out of love of the product.”

Corallo, who is Italy’s honorary consul-general for the islands, grows cocoa on a 297-acre plantation in Príncipe and hermetically seals the beans in layers of polyethylene before loading the bags on a boat that takes six hours to sail to São Tomé.

There, in a teak-lined laboratory he built from shipping containers, with windows overlooking a crumbling boulevard, he makes the chocolate that carries his name. Corallo has developed flavors ranging from 100 percent cocoa bars to chocolate with pepper and salt.

The cocoa tree, which flourishes in humid zones near the equator, was introduced to the volcanic islands of São Tomé and Príncipe by Portuguese colonizers in the 19th century. Cocoa accounts for more than 80 percent of the country’s export earnings, even though it produces less than 3,000 metric tons a year, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest grower, produced about 1.7 million tons, data from the U.N. agency show. São Tomé also earns money from tourism.

Corallo also offers weekly tastings to the handful of tourists who make it to the remote former Portuguese colony that’s now home to luxury holiday resorts and is 186 miles off central Africa’s coast.

During the tastings, Corallo tells his life story in broad strokes, and hands out samples of his chocolate, each piece accompanied by an introductory explanation. He’s an engaging performer, whose stock words include the enthusiastic Italian exclamation “allora.”

“I want to build a relationship with my customers,” he said. “The consumer should be able to verify the story you are telling about your product. There’s so much nonsense in this world already, so many lies and fake stories.”

Last month, Corallo began selling his chocolate directly through his own website rather than through distributors, with a storage site in the Dutch city of Venlo. He’s also turned to Facebook to advertise his company, which sells about 3,300 pounds of chocolate monthly, he said. He grows coffee and pepper as well, in much smaller amounts.

Corallo first set foot in Africa in 1974 as a former professional diver with a degree in tropical agronomy. He devoted himself to growing coffee in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. He still refers to the country as Zaire, and often looks at old pictures on his laptop to reminisce about the nearly 3,000-acre coffee plantation he ran in a region so remote it was only accessible by river boat.

Then, in 1997, rebels overran the country and overthrew leader Mobutu Sese Seko. Corallo was forced to flee and leave his employees and the plantation behind.

“I lost everything,” he said. “People like to hear my life story, but they didn’t have to experience everything themselves.”

When Corallo arrived in Princípe in 1998, looking to rebuild his life, he decided to farm cocoa with the same dedication that olive-oil producers in his native Italy apply to their craft. With a population of 4,000 people and two cars on the island, there wasn’t much to distract him.

“If you do something, do it well, do it with a lot of focus,” he said. “That’s what I believe in.”

There are two other chocolate manufacturers in West Africa. In Ghana, the state-owned Ghana Cocoa Processing Co. makes Golden Tree, a chocolate bar that doesn’t melt in the tropical heat as it’s hawked by street vendors. In Ivory Coast, France-based CEMOI Group makes chocolate bars and confectionery products for local consumption, while supermarkets sell imported bars by Lindt & Spruengli and Mondelez International’s Cote d’Or. Neither of the local makers grows his own cocoa.

There are no other cocoa-growing countries in Africa where chocolate is made locally except Tanzania, a small producer. A startup called Chocolate Mamas began selling bars at local supermarkets there last year.

“There’s not a lot of chocolate manufacturing in the region because it’s very expensive, and it’s not really viable because there’s no large consumer base for it,” said Victoria Crandall, a commodities analyst at Ecobank Transnational. “Whether Africans will start eating chocolate probably hinges on the growth of the middle class.”

Corallo scoffs at industrial chocolate-making methods, which involve extracting cocoa butter and powder, and adding vanilla, milk or palm oil.

The years he invested in developing a unique — and secret — chocolate-making process have paid off.

Corallo’s chocolate is “very popular” among aficionados because of its unadorned flavor, Chocolatiers’ McCoy said. “It’s real chocolate, it’s quite coarse, not the classical creamy stuff,” he said.

It helps that Corallo’s chocolate ticks all the right boxes in foodie fashion. It’s organic and handmade. Still, Corallo refuses to label his chocolate as organic, and he believes that paying for certification is a waste of money.

“Selling products as biological, selling them as certified — it’s cultivating stupidity,” Corallo said. “Biological is not a quality in itself. It’s a business.”