Cocoa is a basic resource for a range of popular products, and chocolate is cocoa’s most famous face. Like the range of chocolate products, cocoa growing is diverse in that it spans different countries, cultures, and approaches to farming around the globe. Chocolate production comes with sustainability challenges: labor, children’s and women’s rights, interaction between smallholder farms and their natural environment, the viability of farming businesses, and the ability of farmers to generate sufficient income. In the long-run, a chocolate maker’s commercial success will depend on viable solutions to these challenges.

We have identified six learnings about how to collect and make the most use of relevant, high-quality data.