From Bean to Bar

Our commitment to sustainability begins with a bean, a tree, and a farmer – because high-quality cocoa beans are the heart of our chocolate. We want to know where our beans come from and under which conditions they are grown and harvested.Lindt & Sprüngli is one of the few chocolate makers that produce from Bean to Bar – from the selection of the fine cocoa varieties through to the finished product.

The Lindt & Sprüngli Farming Program

We put this bean-to-bar advantage to work in achieving our sustainability goals. This is why we implemented our own sustainability Program for the sourcing of cocoa beans: the Lindt & Sprüngli Farming Program. We achieved a 100% traceable and externally verified worldwide cocoa bean supply chain by end of 2020. But what does traceability mean for Lindt & Sprüngli?

The causes of poverty among cocoa farmers are complex. Small cultivation areas, low productivity, a lack of rural infrastructure, institutional and governmental challenges, as well as high input and transportation costs challenge the incomes of cocoa farming households. To tackle these challenges, Lindt & Sprüngli is committed to close cooperation with cocoa farmers and improving their livelihoods within the framework of the Lindt & Sprüngli Farming Program. To ensure the long-term supply of fine flavor cocoa and higher yields for cocoa farmers, Lindt & Sprüngli also fosters research in cocoa varieties.

Diversity of Cocoa Varieties

Compared to the global harvest, Lindt & Sprüngli uses an exceptionally high percentage of fine flavor cocoa bean varieties. The company has a major interest in a rich variety of cocoa beans and high availability of fine-flavor beans. Lindt & Sprüngli therefore supports efforts to preserve the diversity of cocoa varieties in Latin America – the fine-flavor bean’s origin – and fosters the research and development of new productive and disease-resistant fine-flavor cocoa varieties.

We support the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) to maintain an in-house quality laboratory. We further renewed our partnership with the Cocoa Research Center of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, which holds the largest cocoa collection in the world. Such projects serve not only the quality assurance in the service of customers, but also the diversity of cocoa varieties - and they ensure higher yields for cocoa farmers.

Cocoa Butter and other Cocoa Products

Cocoa butter is a crucial ingredient in chocolate production, with comparatively more cocoa butter than sugar used to produce premium chocolate. In accordance with our commitment to traceability for cocoa beans, we have also set a goal to purchase cocoa butter made from beans from sustainability programs. To accomplish this, we rely on a segregation approach, which means that all of the beans from sustainability programs are processed separately from conventional beans. Our goal is to have 100% of our cocoa butter sourced through sustainability programs by 2025.

The goals we have set for 2025 are an acknowledgement of our long-term commitment to sustainable cocoa. They underline our intention to improve the livelihoods of the farmers, their families, workers and the corresponding communities. Over the coming years, our approach will increasingly focus on environmental topics, in particular environmentally friendly agricultural practices, agroforestry and no-deforestation, as well as improved protection of water resources and water management. We have also planned to implement more innovative and targeted training approaches in our origin countries.