How to become a model and entrepreneur Zaina Gohou disrupts the chocolate industry of $ 130 billion with one daring idea

Ivorian-German model Zaina Gohou challenges the exploitation of the global chocolate industry with her new brand, Zacao. In a recent Teen Vogue OP-OD, Gohou-Wiens grandfather was a cocoa farmer explored how her company Beans directly from farmers in West Africa, aimed at eliminating human rights violations and environmental destruction that the industry has long since argued.

Despite the establishment of the World Cocoa Foundation in 2000, a January 2023 Guardian report discovered that work is abused—M Including child labor – Remain deeply rooted in cocoa chains, powered by the dependence on the capitalism of cheap labor. Large companies such as Nestlé, Mars and Hershey continue to benefit while African farmers wear most of the system.

The report showed that the system leads to the exploitation of the work of poor farmers and even children in West Africa to win for large companies such as Nestle, Mars and Hershey.

According to Bill Guyton, a former president of the World Cocoa Foundation that became a senior adviser to the Fine Chocolate Industry Association, the only way is to stop the exploitation of African farmers to go to the source.

“In regular chocolate you have set up a whole system that does not want to change,” Guyton said The guardian. “You have governments and large companies, and making changes to that system would require a new way of acting and a new way to compensate farmers.”

With Zacao is Gohou is just that try– Creating a model rooted in fairness, transparency and a rejection of the colonial legacy embedded in the chocolate trade.

Gohou, who is insisting that modeling was not a path that she was looking for, was inspired to create change after disconnecting how people at home in West -Africa who worked as cocoa farmers who could not afford to send their children to school or clean drinking water, despite the fact that they were directly responsible for producing the riches of $ 130 billion.

The creation of Zacao required a little legwork of the model, but she refused to compromise her standards: the chocolate must be clean, vegetable and organic, produced with unrefined coconut sugar, and every step of the process would be produced transparently, minus every “bean shift”.

The chocolate is fully produced in Ghana, of which Gohou says people often surprise, but for her it should not come as a surprise, given that Ghanaians have been making chocolate for generations.

“People are often surprised when they learn that our premium chocolate is being made in Ghana. But why would it not be? If Champagne is made in France, why would chocolate not be made in Ghana or Cote d’IVoire? Africa is not just a source of raw materials. Teen Vogueclose with a rhetorical question.

While Gohou strives to create change within the chocolate industry itself, according to the website of Zacao, her company already distinguishes itself by working together with more than 250 family companies in Ghana in Ghana, where every farmer pays $ 600 per tonne produced chocolate and helps to build a very province for work to work the local provincial work to be a broken-effecting worker’s broken-up workership at the company.

For Gohou, the end result and the real impact she wants to create is aimed at the workers she wants to authorize, so that she is closed on a high and hopeful memorandum, which encourages young entrepreneurs to follow her blueprint.

“When you create something that really helps people or the planet, your passion will become your driving force and people will want to see you succeed.” Gohou wrote. “I see a future in which farmers get their honest share, can send their children to school, have access to clean drinking water and thrive because the local economy is growing. That is the real impact I dream of.”

Related content: Black-owned ‘Good girl chocolate’ brand is spreading to 150 Whole Foods stores in 20 states