YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
Askinosie Chocolate practices direct trade to Springfield from across the globe to remove the middleman, so it can ensure farmers supplying cocoa beans are treated fairly. The chocolate maker’s 72% Mababu, Tanzania Dark Chocolate Bar is a fan-favorite for its rich, fruity flavor – in addition to the story of collaboration it tells. Last year, high school students from Springfield visited the source of this beloved bar’s beans – a farm in Tanzania led by Mama Mpoki – through the company’s Chocolate University program.
SBJ: Tell us about the farm that the cocoa beans for the 72% Mababu, Tanzania Dark Chocolate Bar came from.
Lawren Askinosie, chief marketing officer: We work directly with a female-led farmer group – it’s a small farmer cooperative in rural southwest Tanzania in a village called Mababu – to make this chocolate bar. The lead farmer’s name is Mama Mpoki, and we’ve been working with her and this group for about 15 years. Because we practice direct trade, we travel there yearly to inspect the cocoa beans, to work with the farmers on post-harvest and fermentation techniques – all of which impact the flavor of the final product of the chocolate bar. We also go there to share profits, because that’s a big part of what we do. It’s one of our tenets of direct trade.
SBJ: What’s the difference between direct trade and fair trade?
Askinosie: We like to say that direct trade is kind of the next level. It’s sort of a step above fair trade. Whereas fair trade can promise that artisans have been paid a certain wage, direct trade removes any kind of middleman and, in our case, it means there are no brokers involved. It is literally us and my dad, Shawn, our founder and CEO, working directly with these farmers to harvest and ferment these beans, to purchase the beans, to export the beans. Our farmers are the exporters of record, which means more money in their pockets, and then we import them directly to our bean warehouse on Commercial Street and start turning them into chocolate bars. It’s definitely a rarity even in our industry. We do it because we think it’s the right thing to do, but we really believe and think that you can taste it. The beans are a better quality and it makes for a better quality chocolate bar because the farmers have an incentive to produce really high-quality cocoa beans.
SBJ: How do you discover and build relationships with the farmers you work with?
Askinosie: (My dad, Shawn Askinosie) kind of jokingly says that, in his former life as a criminal defense attorney, he got very good at finding people and that’s really helped him find these farmer groups that are making beans that not everybody else in the world is buying. That was how it started. He would travel and seek out by asking around, “Who grows the best cocoa?” – but now we get a lot of inquiries via social media [and] on WhatsApp from farmers across the globe.
SBJ: How would you describe the flavor profile of this bar?
Askinosie: It is a dark chocolate because it has a 72% cocoa content and there are only two ingredients. It’s just cocoa beans and organic cane sugar, but it has a really rich, velvety mouth feel and the flavor has a lot of fruitiness.
Founded in 2020, EnCompass Academy moved to a larger home this summer for the 2026-27 year.
