Enjoying blockchain chocolate this holiday season

Increasingly companies are tapping into consumer goodwill and devising creative new ways to draw a closer connection between the purchaser and social impact. According to The Nielsen Global Corporate Sustainability, 66% of American consumers, and 73% of millennials, are willing to spend more on a product if it comes from a sustainable brand.

I was just gifted a chocolate bar made by The Other Bar, an innovative example of a sustainable treat powered by blockchain technology. The team behind The Other Bar, a collaboration between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Fairchain Foundation, are harnessing blockchain technology to empower consumers and directly help small-scale cacao farmers in Ecuador earn a fair wage.

Higher wages encourage sustainable farm development, generate new jobs and promote skill acquisition. Blockchain technology facilitates this “radical equality” (a concept featured on the Other Bar packaging), by strengthening the human connection between farmer and customer and empowering consumers to contribute back to a farmer’s livelihood.

How Does it Work?

Each Other Bar package contains two chocolate bars individually wrapped. One wrapper prominently features a QR code. The code leads consumers to a simple user interface and unlocks a unique token. This token has value; it represents a portion of the profit made from selling that specific candy bar.

There are two different ways to redeem the token:

1. Elect to finance ¼ of a new cacao tree planted on the farm in Ecuador; or
2. Apply a discount of £0.25 (approximately $0.33) on their next purchase of The Other Bar chocolate.

Either way, farmers benefit by increasing their production capacity with more trees or driving demand for their finished (delicious) cacao product. I selected to plant a tree because one additional tree can produce cacao worth £19 (approximately $24.75) to a farmer. The platform instantly displayed information about the specific tree my particular token financed. My donation is funding ¼ of cacao tree #67, which is located on a specific plot of land as displayed on the platform’s mapping API.

In the case of the Other Bar, blockchain enables supply chain transparency and proof of impact rarely experienced by most candy consumers. This example helps close the gap between consumers and farmers and promotes a greater understanding of the impact of purchasing decisions. Innovative business models, such as this, demonstrate how blockchain networks can strengthen human connections around the world while simultaneously producing a (very tasty) chocolate bar.

Be on the lookout for the elusive Other Bar chocolate this holiday season, or you can purchase bars directly online. The initiative is still in a pilot stage of development and the creators are experimenting with a limited run of 20,000 packs of dark chocolate or milk chocolate bars produced with 10 participating farmers. It costs 4 tokens to plant a tree, if all 20,000 tokens are placed back into the farms, this pilot may contribute to the planting of 5,000 new cocoa trees.

To track innovative uses of blockchain for social impact like The Other Bar, visit the Blockchain Impact Ledger (BIL). We plan on incorporating The Other Bar in our next upload of blockchain initiatives advancing social impact. We created the BIL to fill an information gap in the blockchain for social impact space. This initial version of the BIL is a deliberately early iteration, or a minimum viable product (MVP). It is not yet a comprehensive list of global projects, nor has the categorization been completely finalized. We continue to solicit and incorporate feedback from the community. The Blockchain Impact Ledger complements research released by the Blockchain Trust Accelerator in the Blueprint for Blockchain and Social Innovation. Together, these two resources help organizations and social impact leaders think through how to address global challenges with the support of frontier technology.