Jumping Into The First Trip of 2025
The first day of Shawn's most recent trip to Davao, Philippines began smoothly traveling to see our lead cocoa farmer, Peter Cruz (featured on the front of our Davao-origin chocolate bars!) and his partner, Johnny Silva's farm and harvest facility.
During the meeting, Peter let us know about the availability of additional metric tons of cocoa beans. Despite the current extraordinarily high market prices, Shawn contacted the team back at home and met to discuss the affordability and possibilities for additional supply.
At Johnny’s farm, everyone continued to discuss logistics, particularly the loading date for our next container, currently scheduled for mid-February. Upon arrival, Johnny's wife, Mary Joy, welcomed Shawn with traditional snacks and Tableya.
Shawn reviewed cut test results, fermentation temperatures and moisture checks of the beans which were all up to our standards for the upcoming shipment of cocoa beans.
After distributing a large profit share for Peter and the team, we had our consolidated financials prepared so they could understand the calculation. As we always do, we had some small cash distributions for all of the employees on Johnny’s farm.
Shawn presented the farmers with a poster commemorating the
Bon Appétit feature of our white chocolate. We make that with cocoa butter from their Davao, Philippines cocoa beans and the recognition is much deserved.
Baguio School
The Askinosie Foundation has worked on childhood nutrition initiatives in this part of the Philippines since 2009. A couple of years ago through Chocolate University, we funded and are overseeing our sixth school lunch program; two in Tanzania and four in the Philippines. These were founded with sustainability in mind. We only start another program after we’ve completed the current one.
The school is about 5 minutes from Johnny’s farm. Sunshine is our teacher manager at the school. I’ve been working with her at different nearby schools for over a decade. After working with her on so many projects, we have built a trusting relationship over time. Her sister, Laney, is the principal and unfortunately, she wasn’t able to attend our meeting. I’ve worked with her for a long time. The treasurer of this committee is teacher Elvis Joy. She was there along with the two kindergarten teachers. They teach 36 students who receive a nutritious lunch every day. We’ve almost completed two years of a three-year program. Thanks to Emma and Elsie of
A Beautiful Mess, all of these children have moved from “severe malnutrition” to normal height and weight.
One of the amazing things about this program is that even after children “graduate“ kindergarten, our local team monitors the children to make sure that they don’t fall through the cracks of height and weight measurements. We have found that there are sometimes two or three children who continue with significant malnutrition for one reason or another and so they follow them along until the measurements are normal. This is not perfect and believe me there is significant malnutrition in this school of 700 children K thru 6. This three-year program will conclude in May 2026 and we will explore our project opportunities in the next coming year.
While at the school, Shawn shared samples so that each student was able to try chocolate made with beans from Davao, Philippines. Johnny’s daughter, Johann, who also attended school there helped pass out the samples. She helped Shawn with photography while on this trip as she did last year as well. Johann is 19 years old and studying business administration. She hopes to help in her parents' farm business one day.
Shawn shared, "It’s been a long time since I have observed the kind of reverence that these children had toward these little bits of chocolate. I could tell that many of them wanted to save the chocolate to bring home and share with their families, but they just couldn’t because of the heat and humidity."
