Chocolate & confectionery

Work with us to choose the finest ingredients, understand exactly where they come from, then create indulgent chocolate bars, low-sugar treats, delicious pralines and luxurious sweet spreads.

Create with us and grow your business

We love bringing new concepts and fresh ideas to life. Explore our portfolio where we can offer ingredients that are good for consumers and good for farmers. From bars to beverages, we bring expertise across cocoa, coffee, dairy, nuts and spices.

Chocolate bars

Chocolate bar. Two words that make mouths water. How can you unleash the potential of this classic treat? Use our vast experience on the farm and in the food lab. Low-sugar, plant-based, sustainable and traceable. With our cocoa butter, cocoa powder, cocoa liquor and cocoa beans, you can deliver what today’s consumers expect.

Compound coatings

Compound coatings and enrobing

Chocolate all over. The right compound coating can transform a good product into an irresistible one. Together, we select the cocoa powders and confectionery fats you need, optimized for your specific recipe. Let our ingredients support your development of the most delicious and stable products possible.

Fillings, pralines & inclusions

There's nothing quite like biting into a treat with a perfectly smooth and satisfying filling, praline or inclusion. We help you select the right cocoa powder, cocoa liquor, cocoa butter and nut pieces or pastes to surprise and delight your customers. Then we support you turning it into fillings for bars and tablets that fly off the shelves.

Sweet spreads

Sweet spreads are exploding in popularity. Think beyond just toast – add a spoon and now it's a snack. Capture a slice of this exciting market by partnering with us to create flavorsome, satisfying recipes. Why not pair some of our delicious nuts with our premium cocoa ingredients?

Cocoa beans

We source more than a million tons of cocoa beans from every major growing region across the world. Our superior cocoa beans range from high quality West African bulk shipments to small lot, fine flavor cocoa beans. How about a traceable single-origin option for a premium taste, like bold Ghanaian or aromatic Ecuadorian beans?

Cocoa liquors

Also known as cocoa mass or cocoa paste, cocoa liquor is considered the base ingredient of chocolate. We use cocoa from different origins with variations in roasting and post-roast treatment to offer a choice of liquid or solid cocoa liquors. We're at the wheel from sourcing and processing through to packaging.

Cocoa butters

High quality chocolate and confectionery call for high quality cocoa butter. Our pure prime pressed cocoa butters deliver creamy, smooth and melt-in-mouth consistency. Choose from formats including fully and partially deodorized options to ensure easy integration into any recipe or manufacturing process.

Cocoa powders

We never take cocoa powder for granted. The key to so many tasty treats, make sure you have the right type to get exceptional results. Fruity or bitter, vibrant red to dark brown and black – our exciting variety of cocoa powders is an endless source of inspiration.

Whole nuts & pieces

Add textural interest with perfectly roasted whole nuts or pieces, carefully produced to retain flavor, texture and aroma. How about nutty, buttery hazelnuts for a classic favorite? Or pistachio, a rising star that is winning consumers’ hearts with an excitingly vivid color.

Nut powders & flour

Our nut protein powders and nut flours are made from the finest quality almonds and cashews and partially defatted for higher compatibility with cocoa butter. Choose between neutral flavors or new propositions. Dairy-free treats with the right hardness, snap, taste and melting properties are just around the corner.

Nut butters & pastes

Are you team smooth or team crunchy? For delicious spreads at any time of day, our wide portfolio of nut butters and pastes can bring a health halo and unique taste experiences to your consumers. Pair our cocoa ingredients with your pick of almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, peanuts, pistachios, walnuts and macadamias.

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Inspiration

Sensory satisfaction, premiumization or plant-based ingredients: what is your next challenge? Our ingredients portfolio offers near endless natural, nutritious and delicious possibilities for new product development across categories. Learn more about some of our latest chocolate and confectionery application innovations.

Hazelnut spread

A growing appetite for sweet spreads plus the ever-expanding plant-based market equals a huge opportunity for confectionery brands. That’s why we created a concept for a plant-based chocolate hazelnut spread that replaces milk powders with high roasted hazelnut flours. A creamy, rich hazelnut taste without the dairy.

Plant-based chocolate bar

What could possibly be better than a vegan chocolate bar made with our rich cocoa powder and filled with our macadamias, pistachios or hazelnuts? Rich, crunchy and sweet. Use cashew and almond defatted flour as a replacement for milk-based ingredients in great tasting chocolate mass.

Moonlight bonbon

Truffles have never been so eye-catching. With our extra white cocoa butter, color contrasts can be taken to new vivid heights. The perfect visual match for rich and indulgent fillings like hazelnut praline, dulce de leche and coffee, or caramel, lemon and ginger.

Dark Ghana chocolate bar with whole hazelnuts

Different origins offer signature sensory profiles. Our concept for a premium dark Ghana 65% cocoa chocolate bar oozes indulgence with its thick tablet and fruity flavor profile unique to Ghanaian origin cocoa. It also leans on the potential of single-origin cocoa for giving consumers greater choice and traceability.

Sustainability

Our approach to sustainability is guided by our Purpose ‘To be the change for good food and a healthy future’. It is rooted in our belief that healthy, natural food is possible when people working in the food systems prosper and contribute to the restoration of the living world.

As the ones on the ground, in the heart of farming communities, we are well positioned to drive positive environmental and social change in communities and landscapes. And to accelerate and deliver change at scale, we are part of many multi-stakeholder partnerships. When we combine this impact with the application innovations of our chefs, we can offer sustainable choices to our customers and together, help feed the growing appetite for naturally good food.

Cocoa Compass

We've set concrete goals to work together with customers and partners to tackle the key issues facing the cocoa supply chain by 2030, with milestones for action in 2020 and 2024. Our progress is tracked, and the results are transparently published in our annual Cocoa Compass reports.

Coffee LENS

We've set challenging goals to tackle the key issues facing the coffee supply chain by 2025, enabled through structured collaboration with partners. We have achieved a number of 2021 milestones, all of which contribute to our longer-term goals.

Almond Trail

Believe it or “nut,” almonds can only grow in a handful of places with ideal growing conditions. We address sustainability challenges facing the supply chain by setting out targets for water stewardship, carbon reduction and support for ecosystems.

Cashew Trail

Each nut story starts with hard-working farmers and processing workers. Cashew Trail sets 2030 targets to tackle poverty and create economic opportunity. Let's improve the livelihoods of people in the cashew communities and grow farmer yields.

Hazelnut Trail

Our vision: creating a collaborative trail to sustainable hazelnuts by addressing the most pressing issues facing hazelnut farmers, their communities and migrant workers. Our goals build on the progress we’ve made over the last decade with our partners.

Read ofi news

Articles Jan 15, 2025

Andrew Brooks

Head of Cocoa Sustainability, ofi

UN World Day Against Child Labour 2021: Putting children first in cocoa

By Andrew Brooks, Head of Cocoa Sustainability, olam food ingredients (ofi)

This week, the world’s attention turns to a heavy burden that can damage a child’s Health and Education: child labour. In ofi's cocoa business, we are focused on solving this problem every day.

Most child labour in cocoa relates to children carrying out hazardous tasks on the family farm, distinct from the much rarer issue of forced labour, and has no one cause. Labour laws can be misunderstood, and schools might be located far away. Even if there is a school nearby, children may not have the documents they need to enrol. When combined with rural poverty, many parents think their child’s time is best spent helping on the farm. And now, these cocoa-growing communities are also battling a global health pandemic.

We’re working to tackle each of these challenges in turn. Under our Cocoa Compass sustainability ambition, we aim to completely eradicate child labour from our direct supply chain by 2030 and ensure farmers’ children can access the education they are entitled to. In 2020, we reached the critical milestone of rolling out child labour monitoring across 183,000 households in nine countries.

There is still a lot to do, and collaboration with our customers, national governments, and civil society is essential. For example, we recently asked the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to assess the extent to which cocoa farmers and their families have benefited from our sustainability programmes in Côte d’Ivoire, their perception and satisfaction with these interventions, and help to refine our approach further.

Using a due diligence methodology called Social Impact Assessment, the FLA collected extensive data and interviewed over 450 people from ten cocoa communities, including women and children. It found that of all our efforts to tackle child labour, the setting up of child labour monitoring and remediation and enabling access to education are the most advanced and have the most significant impact.

It also revealed that over two-thirds of those interviewed think child labour is on the decline in their community, and 80% believe that the interventions by ofi and our partners are contributing to protecting children.

There are areas for improvement. The FLA suggested we provide additional support to help farmers access affordable labour. And ensure greater follow-up with Village Savings and Loans Associations to maximise their ability to promote child protection.

We know that combining our efforts through multi-stakeholder partnerships, championed by local and regional governments, and supported by international finance institutions, is the best way to create the kind of long-term systemic change needed to reach universal school attendance

and graduation for children in cocoa communities.

This World Day Against Child Labour reminds us that if we want to put children first in cocoa, we must be open to testing new approaches and adapting our efforts based on what works best. The future of a cocoa generation is at stake if we don’t.

Articles Nov 14, 2024

Madeline Bills

Cocoa Innovation Manager at ofi

The sweet treats and trends winning hearts this Valentine’s Day

Author | Madeline Bills | Cocoa Innovation Manager at ofi

Chocolate has long been synonymous with Valentine’s Day, with sweet treats a classic way to celebrate the season of love.

But Valentine’s Day is evolving, with Gen Z and Millennials redefining traditions. Many consumers are choosing to celebrate this day with friends and family members, as well as significant others. In 2023, 40% of Gen Z and 20% of Millennials said they were planning to buy their friends a Valentine’s gift.^[1] And what better way to do so than with cocoa?

As consumers change the way they celebrate Valentine’s Day – and who they celebrate with – there is an opportunity for manufacturers to develop new products. From introducing more exotic flavors in confectionery to creating more experiential formats and expanding into new categories, we’re seeing companies inventing new ways for consumers to celebrate the season of love with those who matter most to them. At ofi we explore the top chocolate, confectionery and bakery trends shaping Valentine’s Day 2024 and how manufacturers can develop new offerings to win the hearts of consumers.

^[1] Actually, Lots of Gen Z Would Rather Spend Valentine’s Day with Their Friends - YPulse

Press Release Sep 25, 2024

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ofi’s net-zero ambition recognized at UK’s largest sustainable business awards

A new carbon monitoring tool developed by leading food ingredients supplier ofi and Google geo-spatial partner NGIS, has been recognized in the “Net-Zero Innovation of the Year” category at this year’s Edie awards, which celebrate sustainability leadership.

The tool is designed to measure carbon gains and losses across supply chains. It uses satellite imagery and machine learning to track changes in forest cover and carbon stocks at a granular level - down to the individual farm¹. This data is helping ofi to identify areas at risk of deforestation and prioritize conservation efforts on cashew, cocoa and coffee suppliers’ farms and in sourcing landscapes.

Climate Action Manager at ofi, Dr Pedro Lafargue said: “We are delighted to be recognized for our innovative solution that is helping us monitor and measure GHG emissions and progress towards net-zero goals. Part of this is about driving transformational change in strategic landscapes which means keeping growing and retaining more trees on and around farms.

“Planting more trees is one of the ways to move towards net-zero, but carbon sequestration potential is highly dependent on tree species and farm typology. The tool allows us to assess the optimum level of planting for different farmers and farms so we can create more efficient agroforestry programs that maximize both yields and carbon storage.”

ofi’s customers, who are some of the world’s largest food retailers and manufacturers, can access results of the data-driven sequestration efforts in their joint supply chains via performance metrics on ofi’s sustainability management system AtSource. These insights can help them monitor and reduce their climate risk and meet science-based targets, as well as prepare for compliance with new EU rules and disclosures in relation to nature and climate risks.

The move by ofi to take carbon stock monitoring from a manual, desktop-based process to an integrated pipeline which leverages cloud computing, is allowing ofi to progressively scale this analysis across multiple commodities and regions – covering over 950,000 farms so far.

But Lafargue says that there’s a role for industry partners to play to scale up the innovation and progress towards net-zero at scale: “While the tool can help our customers quantify the ecosystem services provided to supply their ingredients and invest efficiently in better farming systems, we need them to recognize the efforts made by farmers to plant trees and maintain agroforestry systems with financial incentives, like annual premiums, to scale up these efforts over the long-term.”

Looking ahead, there is potential to take the tool beyond ofi supply chains to quantify carbon stocks and removals across entire production landscapes to provide better data for the industry on land use change and carbon removals.

ofi was also a finalist in the Circular Economy of the Year award for using residual cocoa shells to fuel its cocoa factories², where it produces its premium cocoa ingredients deZaan. The circular biomass boilers will reduce natural gas usage and CO₂ emissions at ofi’s Koog aan deZaan facility in the Netherlands by 50% and in Mannheim, Germany, where it is believed to be the first cocoa shell boiler of its kind in the country, it will save approximately 8,000 tons of CO₂ annually.

Discover much more about what ofi has to offer at ofi.com

Notes to Editors

¹ The Carbon Sequestration Monitoring Tool combines data from ofi polygon-mapped farms and satellite data with machine learning techniques to build models in Google Earth Engine that calculate the total aboveground biomass (AGB) - vegetation above the soil, such as stumps, trees, and foliage and how much carbon is present in each plot.

² https://www.ofi.com/news-and-events/press-release/olam-food-ingredients-turns-cocoa-shells-into-power-to-fuel-factory.html

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Chocolate & confectionery

Create with us and grow your business

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