Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) encourages local consumption of chocolate and cocoa products

Joseph Boahen Aidoo, the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), has encouraged the local consumption of chocolates and other cocoa products, to help boost Ghana’s production levels and value addition. Mr Aidoo, who was speaking at the Cocoa Value Chain Investment meeting in Accra on Thursday, said the current national average consumption of 0.6 per cent of these products annually, was far too low and discouraging. “We have the cocoa beans and the technology but the market for the finished product is just not encouraging. It’s not just the processing we want to focus on. We want to create a local demand that will spur on investors to get into local processing of finished cocoa products. He said regrettably, a large percentage of the finished cocoa products on the Ghanaian market currently, were produced outside the country, because local processing was largely done at the primary level, which included the conversion of the cocoa beans into cocoa ...