cocoa
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Hershey made chocolate ordinary. That was the big idea.
A five-cent bar helped turn a luxury into a habit. The business behind it now has to make the same trick work for pretzels, popcorn, and a much more expensive cocoa bean.
Manfred Borer and the missing links in your chocolate
A Swiss carpenter turned supply-chain entrepreneur, Manfred Borer has spent years making smallholder farms visible. At Koltiva, his approach pairs software with a decidedly physical requirement: someone has to go and look.
How Ferrero Turned a Hazelnut Shortage Hack Into a $22 Billion Snack Empire
The family behind Nutella spent eight decades turning scarcity into a system: invent a distinctive product, control the details, and give it time to become a ritual. Now Ferrero is applying that playbook to everything from protein wafers to Froot Loops.
Agridence
Agridence is a Singapore technology company that helps global agri-commodity supply chains prove where their raw materials come from. Born in 2018 as HeveaConnect, a digital B2B marketplace for physical natural rubber, it rebranded in 2022 and expanded into a modular traceability and compliance platform now spanning rubber, palm oil, cocoa, coffee, coconut and more. Its tools trace commodities from the farm plot to the shipment and file the paperwork regulators such as the EU Deforestation Regulation demand, serving tyre makers, food multinationals, traders and industry associations.
Koltiva
Koltiva is a Swiss-Indonesian agritech and climate-tech company that makes agricultural supply chains traceable, inclusive, and climate-smart. Through its KoltiTrace software platform and KoltiSkills field services, it connects smallholder producers to global brands with seed-to-table traceability, farm mapping, deforestation and EUDR compliance, carbon assessments, and digital finance. Founded in 2013 and led by co-founder and CEO Manfred Borer, Koltiva reports work with over 2 million registered producers across dozens of commodities and more than 90 countries.
ProfilePrint - AI-driven Ingredient Quality Platform
ProfilePrint is a Singapore-based B2B platform that turns the molecular signature of a food ingredient into a digital fingerprint and uses AI to predict its identity, origin and quality within seconds. Built on patented digital food Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) technology, it pairs proprietary near-infrared hardware with custom machine-learning models so agribusinesses can grade coffee, cocoa, tea, dairy, oils and other ingredients without slow, subjective lab work. Founded in 2017 by Alan Lai, the company is deployed across roughly 50-60 locations on six continents and counts industry giants such as Cargill, Olam, Louis Dreyfus and Sucafina as investors and customers.
Daniel Jalkut
Daniel Jalkut is a Mac and iOS indie developer who founded Red Sweater Software in 2002 after seven years engineering Mac OS at Apple. He is best known for MarsEdit, the long-running desktop blog editor he bought from Brent Simmons in 2007, and for FastScripts, a scripting automation utility. For 16 years he co-hosted Core Intuition with Manton Reece, one of the defining podcasts of the indie Apple-developer scene, and he runs the long-form interview show Bitsplitting. He is a fixture of the indie web and micro.blog community, writing about software craft, the business of going it alone, and the texture of a programming life.