Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  All these formalities, so foreign to my US sensibility and my inherent (and apparently inappropriate) lack of pretension, begged the larger question. Why did all these civilities matter? Couldn’t you just follow a fucking recipe? How hard could this be? You stand at the very bottom of the cocoa value chain. You protect your place at the bottom of the sump pump in the basement of the House of Chocolate as if it were the Golden Stool of the Ashanti. Please, for the love of Ghana, focus on the important things! Or is the proper form of address more important than any technical skill required in chocolate production?

  Five plus two plus one.

  Eight weeks until the Fancy Food Show opened. A few days after the vanillin episode, I received a new fax from Sarpong, stating that Ghana Customs had impounded our importation of whole-milk powder needed to produce our 48-percent milk chocolate recipe. “There will be delays.” Why? Was there a domestic Ghanaian milk industry requiring protective quotas? Had some cabal of hitherto invisible dairy farmers up in Brong-Ahafo conspired to prevent any foreign competition? How much was this going to cost?

  Sarpong suddenly became Mr. Communication. Another fax, this time saying he would send the nonvanillin samples, following the Omanhene recipe word for word, as I earlier requested. As if I ever requested anything else.

  Five days later, I received two packages from Sarpong. The first was a beat-up corrugated cardboard box held together with cellophane tape. It was not my fancy shipping container, but it contained a set of grainy, melted chocolate samples shipped without any freezer packs or insulated packaging. The bars failed to snap but instead broke apart with rough, uneven edges. The chocolate crunched in my mouth; granules of sugar stuck to my teeth. It was the worst-tasting set of chocolate samples yet received. The second box was my fancy, insulated shipping carton. Perhaps the “good” samples would be inside. Maybe Sarpong wanted to send me every iteration of the production samples. Instead, inside I found only a technical manual for some Nigerian HVAC equipment, nothing more—why the chocolate was not put inside this carton, I will never know.

  I got up at 3:00 am. It took several tries to punch in Sarpong’s phone number, the string of digits seemed to go on forever, and I was sleepy and made mistakes, almost always on the last number or two.

  “Mr. Sarpong? Are you there? I think there has been a … mistake.” I tried to find a word that would sound less accusatory but, at the end of the day, as Ghanaians so often say, a mistake was indeed made.

  “No, that is not possible. Ei! Did you not receive the special box?” This was Sarpong’s term for the expensive shipping container. “We always put the chocolate in the special box! … What did you say? A manual? What sort of manual?”

  “You mistakenly sent me some sort of technical manual; it has electrical schematics. It is for machinery from Nigeria.”

  “This is not possible.”

  I regarded the open insulated box, the webbing tangled on the floor and inside, a lone technical manual. Did he think I was making this up? A long pause.

  “Ei, there has been a mistake. I don’t know how this could have happened-o.” I hear Sarpong yelling at an underling in Twi, bitter imprecations followed by tsk-tsk-tsk-ing, sighing, and another spirited outpouring of displeasure as if the underling were a schoolboy.

  I will never fully understand the Ghanaian penchant for public humiliation of subordinates. To me, it reflects poorly on the leadership skills of those in authority. Did they fail to train their workers properly? Did they fail to give them proper instructions or latitude to make decisions on their own? Why was any failure always due solely to the missteps of some underling? No performance of this street theater would be complete without the bowing and scraping, without the “yes, sir, sorry, sir” shambling as the worker exits, stage left, vowing to do better next time. In contrast to Sarpong’s overwrought behavior, I tried to exude calm, but my wavering voice betrayed my frustration.

  “Paul,” I said, deliberately calling him by his first name, addressing him as my equal, abandoning any pretense of respect based on age. “We all fail if these samples aren’t correctly manufactured and delivered on time, according to my Omanhene recipe.”

  “Okay, okay, I shall speak to Mr. Amoaka-Asiedu. He oversees the confectionery line. I shall go and come.”

  A few minutes later, his perturbation evident, Sarpong agreed to make a new batch and personally double-check the production details. I thumbed through the dog-eared pages of my calendar. There was a Maersk cargo ship sailing from the port of Tema on May 27, 1994. I concluded that this would be the last possible sailing date to get a container of chocolate delivered prior to the Fancy Food Show—and this would require no delays whatsoever. Shipping by sea freight is considerably cheaper than shipping by airfreight. I didn’t even want to contemplate the math if we sent even a small portion of our container load by air. The only math that mattered was five plus two plus one, and the math was looking bad.

  I had no samples customs-cleared and landed in the US. Far from it. Truth told, I hadn’t produced any chocolate that approached the taste profile I was seeking: a hybrid dark/milk chocolate, just right for what I thought was the emerging sophistication of the US consumer palate. I designed our recipe to have twice the cocoa liquor required by the FDA so we could label the chocolate as a “dark” chocolate. We’d also include a small portion of full cream milk to soften the inherent bitterness of pure cocoa liquor. In doing so, I wanted to create the world’s darkest milk chocolate. I sought a flavor profile attractive to the majority of Americans who grew up eating Hershey bars, but who now wanted something more robust, something more adult.

  Ghana is five hours ahead of Milwaukee in late spring. I awoke at three again to call Sarpong. The last batch of chocolate he sent had tasted grainy, which disappointed me because my recipe specified pre-grinding the sugar used to produce the cocoa mass (the precursor to finished chocolate, the cocoa mass comprises the first blending of cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, and sugar). I specified that this pre-grind meet an exact micron size to assure smoothness in the finished bars. Embarrassed by his failures thus far, Sarpong again offered to double-check all the production details, his frustration evident. His voice was more raspy than usual. I’m sure he regarded me as a “small boy.”

  And yet Sarpong persisted with the Omanhene project. Was Flight ordering him to cooperate? At my insistence, Sarpong faxed me the recipe he’d been using to produce chocolates. I was at a loss to understand why the last batch was so far from my expectations. I expected Sarpong’s production recipe to match the confidential recipe I provided him months ago, in which our ingredient quantities are measured in hundredths of a percentage point. Sarpong’s recipe didn’t match mine. I added up the percentages on his recitation of the Omanhene ingredients, and I found they totaled 102 percent, a physical impossibility and a surprising error on the part of Sarpong, the process engineer who often delighted in telling me, “I’m a maths gent.” Happily, though, Sarpong confirmed in his fax that next time they will mill the sugar to x number of microns, as I had previously specified. That was reassuring, but the fax amounted to a confession on Sarpong’s part that he’d been producing samples to a different specification. Whose, I didn’t know—but not mine.

  Five plus two plus one.

  Producing chocolate samples correctly was beside the point if I couldn’t get them from Ghana to New York in time for the Fancy Food Show.

  * * *

  In 1994, communication with Ghana consisted of fax transmissions printed on rolls of Thermo-Fax paper that would fade to an indecipherable smudge inside of a few weeks. Static-laden landline phone calls required me to shout into the receiver, on those infrequent occasions when I could secure an open line. One morning, toward the end of May, I was working out of my house, in an attic room tucked above the garage, the international headquarters of what was no longer Wifely Sprockets but now called the “”Omanhene Cocoa Bean Company.”

  I had gone downstairs for a minute to do laundry, a
never-ending task with twin toddlers. Linda was downtown at work, a forty-five-minute commute from our house; the pressure on her to bill hours was severe, as is typical for a young associate attorney hoping to make partner. My brother, who had come to assist, saw the letter scroll through the fax machine, curling like a tiny Torah. He yelled down the stairwell to the laundry room.

  “Steve, you gotta see this fax. It’s a copy of the Commerce Business Daily.” The publication is the official record of all government contracts.

  “There’s a contract here for … hey, can you hear me? Are you sitting down?”

  I’m ankle-deep in a pile of Hanna Andersson pajamas and tiny underpants.

  “I’m listening.” Do I add bleach to the whites along with the vinegar?

  “There’s a government contract to write—get this—a feasibility study on—can you hear me?—a ‘Proposal for a Feasibility Study for Chocolate Production Facility in Ghana.’ It’s TDA Project 93-023.”

  The implication of this was immediate. My tax dollars, my government, was funding a study to replicate what I had almost fully accomplished and undertaken at great personal financial risk. What’s more, my government was funding a road map that could be used by anyone who sought to compete with me.

  “Steve, there is only one guy on the planet that is qualified to write this study. And it’s you. It pays $285,700.”

  “Get out!”

  “You gotta call the agency that is administering the funds … the TDA.”

  The TDA, or to be precise, the USTDA, stands for the United States Trade and Development Agency. In its own words, it is “an independent US Government agency under the Executive Branch [that] promotes economic development in developing countries by funding feasibility studies, consultancies, training programs, and other project planning services.” In early 1994, this little agency had an annual budget of around $35 million, of which about $1.8 million was spent each year on African projects. In the entirety of the US budget, $1.8 million a year for Africa is not much money at all, a mere rounding error. Funding for Africa had comprised only 14 percent of all USTDA program expenditures during the previous eleven fiscal years. Yet the payoff was substantial. USTDA claims that during the period from fiscal years 1981 to 1992, their funding of feasibility studies resulted in over $400 million of US exports to Africa—an astonishing return on investment. In fiscal year 1994, African projects included proposals for a bonded refrigerated warehouse in Guinea, a coal-fired power plant in Tanzania, a cement project in Yemen and … a chocolate production facility in Ghana.

  Ask your barista or hair stylist what a feasibility study is, and you get a straightforward answer; it’s a study to determine if a project—for example, building a chocolate production facility in Ghana—is possible, is feasible. But a feasibility study is not the first study undertaken in the arcane world of the USTDA. There had been a pre-feasibility study, termed a Definitional Mission Study or DMS. I paused to consider. I understood the rationale behind a feasibility study—but a pre-feasibility study? This was an abstraction based upon an abstraction. A pre-feasibility study invites us to study, whether we should study, whether it is feasible to build a chocolate factory in Ghana.

  The frustration of the last four years boiled over. Why was my government spending my tax money to study what I was already doing? I concluded that I was a shoo-in to win this grant: I was literally the only person on earth who had tried to produce export-quality chocolate manufactured entirely in Ghana. Nobody, but nobody, knew more about this tiny bit of knowledge than I. Big fish, extremely small pond.

  There were many obstacles to our success: Omanhene was thinly capitalized, my talents had their limits, and I was dealing with a production partner who was far from convinced that this endeavor was worth the effort. But chief among my challenges was not letting myself get distracted. Any entrepreneur or funder of an entrepreneur—to say nothing of my own father—will likely tell you that success has an awful lot to do with staying focused. Concentrate on the things that matter and let slide those things that matter less. I hear you, DW! The last thing I needed was to complicate my life by writing a proposal that was due before the Fancy Food Show. On the other hand, $285,700 was a lot of money; winning the contract would buy me time with my most important stakeholder: my wife, Linda.

  I resolved to take on the TDA project and to submit a proposal to write the full feasibility study. The due date was June 15, 1994, less than three weeks away and five weeks from the opening day of the Fancy Food Show.

  First, I decided to call and then make a trip to visit the head of the USTDA, Todd Kasubiak, who I learned was born in Wisconsin, a fellow Badger. I found a phone number for Todd and called him.

  “Mr. Kasubiak, this is your lucky day!”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m Steve Wallace, from Wisconsin, and I’m looking at your Project 93-023, the feasibility study for a chocolate production facility in Ghana. I’ve been working toward this exact goal for four years at my own expense, and I can give you the answer right now for half the price of your feasibility study. The answer is: ‘It is feasible.’ In fact, not only is it feasible, I’ve actually done it, and I’d like to invite you to New York in late July, to see how we did it. We’re debuting our Ghana chocolate at the Fancy Food Show.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line.

  “What part of Wisconsin are you from?”

  I neglected to share the fact that we might have a booth with no actual chocolate bars to sample, but eight weeks might yet be enough time to manufacture and ship our first full production run. Five plus two plus one, I thought. With luck, we could maybe cut the equation to “five plus one plus one,” if we could somehow get a favorable customs and FDA inspection.

  I told Todd that his agency wouldn’t look very good if it turned out I had already accomplished the very thing his feasibility study set out to review, thereby effectively mooting the need for the grant. What is more, I found a way to produce (okay, nearly produce) chocolate in Ghana for a fraction of the cost projections contained in the pre-feasibility study.

  So here’s how US government foreign aid works: the USTDA doesn’t come up with ideas for pre-feasibility studies out of thin air. They work with foreign governments to fund studies that might possibly lead to US exports, thus creating jobs here in the US. It is a near-perfect blending of eleemosynary considerations and self-interest. In this case, the USTDA provided $285,700 to fund a feasibility study on behalf of Ghana’s Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), the Ghana equivalent to the United States Social Security Trust Fund. In 1994, SSNIT was very likely the largest institutional investor in the entire country; today, it is indeed the largest nonbank financial institution in Ghana, with investment assets of over one billion dollars. And then, as now, SSNIT was looking for places to invest its pile of cash safely, so it would have the resources to pay out pensions in the future as Ghanaian workers reach retirement age. SSNIT, all things being equal, would prefer to invest in Ghanaian domestic projects that served Ghana’s national interest, employ Ghanaians, or otherwise build up infrastructure assets within Ghana.

  So, the USTDA, knowing full well that SSNIT is one of the few Ghana institutions flush with money, cleverly fronts a few hundred thousand dollars to get SSNIT to consider investing in projects that have a substantial US follow-up component either in terms of consultants, employees, or US-made capital goods. If you are fortunate and talented enough to secure the contract to write the initial pre-feasibility study (the DMS), the last sentence of the study has to read: The case warrants further study. Then you are perfectly situated to win the follow-up contract for the full feasibility study, which pays considerably more money. If you undertake the DMS pre-feasibility study and conclude the case merits no further study at all, then you are one and done—no further consulting contract for you on that project. You can imagine how few if any pre-feasibility DMS reports conclude there is no merit in moving on to the fea
sibility study stage.

  James Galloway wrote the pre-feasibility study on building a chocolate-production facility in Ghana. It is no surprise that he concluded that a full feasibility study was warranted. More astounding to me was his conclusion: that the facility would cost $20 million—$18.75 million dollars of which would be US-manufactured capital goods—in other words, 94 percent of the factory would be comprised of US goods. Visit the production floor of any large-scale chocolate manufacturing facility anywhere in the world including in the US, and you will be hard-pressed to find 94 percent of the capital goods coming from the US. Chocolate manufacturing technology is largely based in Europe, with companies like Buhler (German/Swiss), Netzsch (German), Duyvis Wiener (Dutch), and Carle and Montanari (Italian) crafting the machinery to roast and grind the beans and manufacture the finished chocolate. While the DMS pre-feasibility report seemed purpose-written to entice the TDA’s objective of promoting the purchase of US-made capital goods, the report bore little relationship to an actual working chocolate factory.

  While I might have been the most uniquely qualified person in the world to write this study, I was not the person best connected to the community of ex-government employees and consultants who funnel work to one another. So far as I could tell, Jim Galloway had never once visited Ghana, nor had he any experience in cocoa processing. Moreover, he had never in his life produced an edible chocolate bar (I guess we shared that characteristic).

  The TDA awarded the feasibility study to Jim Galloway, and I lost out on the $285,700 consulting fee. In the fullness of time, Galloway would seek out my advice that, in the fullness of time, I would decline to share. I was not going to give away my hard-earned knowledge for free. His TDA report reached the same conclusion that I’d been advocating to the Ghana Cocoa Board: what Ghana needed was a strong partner with recipe development and marketing skills; what Ghana needed was Omanhene—or a company like Omanhene.