There’s a different way of going about generating profit and we show that it can be done. Our roadmap says it all: we aim for impact and are commercially successful at the same time. If we can run a successful business case with the objective to make impact, so can Big Choco. So yes, being profitable is a necessity, but our profit is less than it could be if this was our main objective.

Growth and impact

• Revenue was up 22.7% in the reporting period; our gross margin was 41.6% and our net profit margin landed at 4.5%.
• Our revenue rose from 44.9 million to 55.1 million.
• Our gross margin improved by 1.1 percentage points, rising from 40.5% to 41.6%.
• Our employee benefits expense as a percentage of revenue was up from 9.5% to 11.6%
• Taking all this into consideration, our net profit margin was 4.5%.
• Our impact costs amounted to 2,683,000 in the reporting period, which corresponds to a little over 4.8% of revenue.
• We paid 2,283,572 in Tony’s additional premium last year.
• . we’ve sold 36,560,690 chocolate bars this year. BAM!

Tony’s premium
Our concrete interpretation of ‘paying a higher price’. Over the past reporting period, we paid $ 200 in Fairtrade premium per metric ton (mt) of cocoa beans and $ 400 per mt in Ivory Coast and $ 175 per mt in Ghana. So, overall, the premium payment to our five partner cooperatives came to 3.5 million. This can be broken down into 1,225,218 in Fairtrade premium and 2,283,572 in Tony’s additional premium.