Trinidad and To­ba­go Co­coa ranked in the Top 50 Best of the World once again!

Three (3) of the five (5) sam­ples sub­mit­ted from Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Na­tion­al Co­coa Awards to the glob­al Co­coa of Ex­cel­lence Pro­gramme 2021, to com­pete for In­ter­na­tion­al Co­coa Awards, have been se­lect­ed among the best 50 bean sam­ples with ex­cep­tion­al flavour, from amongst 235 glob­al sam­ples, af­ter the first round of judg­ing. These three sam­ples will now vie for In­ter­na­tion­al Co­coa Awards at the Sa­lon du Choco­lat, Paris, France lat­er in Oc­to­ber of this year.

The world-ranked Trinidad and To­ba­go sam­ples orig­i­nat­ed from Ms. An­nette Mills of Chara­mal Es­tate, Aripo; Mr. Winthrop Hare­wood of Roods and Perch­es Es­tate, Table­land; and the Farm­ers of the Four Roads Tamana Clus­ter, Tamana, who sub­mit­ted a com­pos­ite sam­ple.  The mem­bers of this group are Mr. Al­bert Mal­oney, Mr. Calvin David, Ms. He­len Mon­segue, Mr. Lyn­coln Sa­landy, as well as Mr. Mar­tin and Jacque­line Matthew who processed the group’s bean sam­ple. This lat­ter cou­ple won an In­ter­na­tion­al Co­coa Award in 2019.

These 3 sam­ples were among the top 5 lo­cal win­ners of the 2021 Na­tion­al Co­coa Awards (NCA), an ini­tia­tive of the Co­coa De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (CD­CT­TL).

The NCA is geared to­ward cel­e­brat­ing out­stand­ing co­coa qual­i­ty and the di­verse flavours of our name­sake Trini­tario co­coa va­ri­ety. CD­CT­TL brought to­geth­er key col­lab­o­ra­tors to form the Na­tion­al Or­gan­is­ing Com­mit­tee for the NCA, com­pris­ing the Co­coa Re­search Sec­tion of the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture Land and Fish­eries, the Co­coa Re­search Cen­tre of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, and Ex­porTT

At the next stage of in­ter­na­tion­al judg­ing the 50 glob­al bean sam­ples will be processed in­to choco­late for the fla­vor sen­so­ry eval­u­a­tion by the Co­coa of Ex­cel­lence Tech­ni­cal Com­mit­tee, and a broad­er pan­el of pro­fes­sion­als dur­ing the month of Sep­tem­ber.  There­after, 15-20 of the 50 fi­nal­ists will be win­ners of In­ter­na­tion­al Co­coa Awards (ICA).

We ea­ger­ly await the an­nounce­ment of the fi­nal re­sults of the ICA Awards. Trinidad and To­ba­go is the cur­rent record hold­er for win­ning In­ter­na­tion­al Co­coa Awards. Since the in­cep­tion of the Co­coa of Ex­cel­lence Pro­gramme in 2009, Trinidad and To­ba­go has won an out­stand­ing 8 In­ter­na­tion­al Co­coa Awards. We hope to con­tin­ue this win­ning streak in 2021.

The CD­CT­TL will con­tin­ue to pro­mote and de­vel­op the ex­per­tise of lo­cal pro­duc­ers to in­ter-

Na­tion­al award-win­ning lev­els, in ful­fil­ment of its man­date as the dri­ver and cat­a­lyst of lo­cal co­coa sec­tor.