News and our stories GROUP

Our Chairman, Andreas Jacobs, is going to step down from his post at the Shareholders Meeting of December 2016. He was at the helm of our company for the past eleven years - leaving an amazing legacy. We all at Barry Callebaut would like to warmly thank Andreas Jacobs for this vision and great leadership. Without him, our Group would not be where it is today!

Our CEO, Antoine de Saint-Affrique, addressed 1,300 delegates at the recent One Young World 2016 Summit in Ottawa/Canada. Find following an abstract of his speech on the duty to step in for education, how companies can be a force for good, calling for action on company and personal levels.

Barry Callebaut invited two brave female managers from Côte d'Ivoire to visit its factory and talk about their challenges on the ground.

The 19 CHOCOLATE ACADEMY™ centers worldwide play a key role in Barry Callebaut’s Gourmet & Specialties’ success story. With the opening of the first Van Houten Beverage™ Academy center in Sweden, the company transfers a proven concept into a new business segment. The new center of expertise will offer customers of Barry Callebaut specialized services for chocolate, cocoa and all powder based beverages products.

Haji Saleh owns a UTZ certified cocoa farm in the Polman (Polewali Mandar) district in the West Sulawesi province of Indonesia. For Haji Saleh and many other cocoa farmers in Polman, cocoa cultivation – a family tradition reaching back for five generations – has gradually improved with the support of cocoa sustainability activities.

In January 2016, 26 Barry Callebaut employees from around the world were invited to visit Cameroon, one of the cocoa origin countries where Barry Callebaut has implemented cocoa sustainability programs. The employees are part of the company’s initiative “Winning Together” aiming to engage employees in corporate social responsibility activities.

Composed of some 20,000 molecules, the cocoa bean is the most complex foodstuff on earth. Its complexity dwarfs that of any other plant. And when the bean is fermented, roasted, ground to become cocoa powder or conched to become chocolate, the complexity only increases. Nobody knows why the cocoa bean behaves the way it does - why it goes insane, as one researcher calls it.

Since the acquisition of la Morella nuts in 2012, Barry Callebaut is much more than chocolate and cocoa. La Morella nuts, the artisanal nut specialist based South East of Barcelona/Spain, brought a wide array of new products into the Barry Callebaut family. Nuts in all kind of variations make a perfect addition to Barry Callebaut’s chocolate products - nut products being the second largest product segment used in the confectionery industry. Sourcing the best nuts is key to manufacture products of the highest quality and freshness. We accompanied Oscar Sans, la Morella nuts’ sourcing manager, during a typical day of the nut harvesting season in Spain’s most important origin and home of la Morella nuts, Catalunya.

Jordi Roca brings Cacao Barry™ chocolate to Annapurna in Nepal

With increasing demand for chocolate products in warmer climates, Barry Callebaut recently launched new milk and dark chocolate as well as compound recipes with a higher thermo-tolerance. The new recipes have a melting point which is up to 4 degrees Celsius higher than normal. We asked the R&D Managers at the forefront of this new development, to explain why this is not about a new chocolate, but about a toolbox and what challenges they had to overcome during the years of research.