Cocoa Can Do More Than Chocolate

Photos and story: Patrick Rohr

“It’s quite simple,” says Hoang Nguyen: “It ultimately comes down to the fact that nothing nature provides is waste. Everything has value.”

The cocoa farmer beams. My request to summarize in one sentence what “circular economy” means to him was quite a challenge, he says. Yet it’s quite obvious: “Even our ancestors practiced agriculture with this understanding.”

We’re standing on Hoang’s small cocoa farm in a suburb of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. Today, ten employees from the Vietnamese chocolate company Marou are visiting: technical advisors, sustainability experts, a supply chain manager and marketing specialists.

Hoang is teaching them what’s important when it comes to caring for cocoa plants. And they’re seeing how almost everything a cocoa plant produces can be put to use — not just the beans.

Knowledge that travels on

What Marou employees learn today, they later pass on to more than 500 farmers who produce cocoa for Marou. “We spend about half of our working hours in the fields with our producers,” says Nhat Ha Quang, the cocoa technical advisor at Marou. “Working with the farmers is very important to us. After all, they supply our most important product: cocoa.”

Tuan Nguyen nods. He is in charge of the circular economy project at Helvetas Vietnam. “That’s exactly our approach,” he says. “We provide targeted training to individual farmers. They later pass on their knowledge to other farming families — or to employees of partner companies like Marou, who support their own suppliers." As a result, to date Helvetas has reached 3,100 cocoa farmers in various regions. The goal is at least 3,500. At the same time, the aim is to better connect producers with the buyers of their products.

The key to this lies with farmers like Hoang — people who are willing to share their knowledge and convince others. However, this isn’t always easy; at first glance, recycling plant waste mainly means extra work for the farmers. But over time, they realize that they benefit from it.

In the meantime, Hoang has led us into a spacious barn. He keeps 80 goats here, whose meat he sells. The animals are fed the shells of the cacao pods.

“The shell of the cacao fruit contains many nutrients. Throwing it away would be a complete waste.”

Hoang Nguyen, cacao farmer

To help Hoang store the feed longer, he ferments the husks and mixes them with leaves from the cacao trees. He’s now shouldered a bucket of this mixture. Hoang walks over to the goats and distributes the feed. “Do you know what the best part is?” he asks the group. “The goats not only provide me with a good source of extra income, but they also contribute to the cycle themselves.”

New growing conditions for cocoa

Hoang then asks the group to step outside the barn, where he has set up several compost piles in a shady spot. “When done right, compost makes a major contribution to healthy plant nutrition,” Hoang explains to the young cocoa experts. “Goat manure is a key component.”

The farmer grabs a large shovel and dumps the goat manure onto a pile that already contains dried grass, cocoa tree leaves and fruit peels. And biochar. “The biochar brings oxygen into the soil and is a good reservoir for nutrients,” says Hoang.

Hoang produces biochar in a special pyrolysis kiln that he received from Helvetas. In pyrolysis, organic materials are broken down into gases, liquids and solids under high heat and with little oxygen. Charcoal is among the byproducts.

“Our ancestors were already familiar with this process,” says Helvetas project manager Tuan. “Instead of a kiln, they used a simple pit in the ground.”

Today, a fire inside a large metal cylinder heats the plant waste that Hoang places in the oven inside smaller, long aluminum tubes: shells from cacao pods, coconuts and macadamia nuts.

After 36 hours, the moisture and gases have escaped from the plant residues. What remains is charcoal. This charcoal is valuable for nutrient-rich soils. But it can do even more: Bio-plastics can also be produced from biochar.

The next step in the cycle

How this works can be seen about an hour’s drive from Hoang’s farm, in the industrial district of Long An. Here, at the Diamond Color factory, biochar like Hoang’s is mixed with biopolymers — that is, with biodegradable plastic fibers. This creates recyclable and biodegradable plastic.

As I walk through Diamond Color’s large production hall, I see a worker pouring a large sack of biochar into a container, from which long, thick black strands emerge shortly afterward: plastic made from biochar. Because the strands are very hot, they run directly into a water bath several meters long, where they are cooled.

At the other end of the machine, they end up in a shredder, which breaks them down into fine granules. Once melted, these granules can be molded into any desired plastic product.

Thang Mai Danh’s Tri-Dung workshop, located not far from the plastic factory, provides a great example of this in practice. Thang was the long-time head of a South Korean plastic manufacturing company before he set up his own small factory in 2008. Six people work per shift at his facility.

Three of the four machines produce items made of conventional plastic. Only the machine at the very back of the production hall manufactures bioplastic products.

“Bioplastic is tougher than regular plastic,” Thang explains. “That’s why the production volume isn’t comparable to that of products made from regular plastic.” At that moment, Ha Lai Thi jumps up. She has been working for Thang for eight years and is operating the bioplastic machine today. Ha opens a hatch and uses pliers to remove any plastic stuck on the mold.

“Bioplastic sticks together much faster than conventional plastic,” says Ha. After a few minutes, she’s done. She pours a few more drops of oil into the gearbox, and then lids for the bioplastic cups start rolling out of the machine again. She has them manufactured by AirX Carbon. The machine produces 2,000 cups a day.

Ha is currently working on the final step: Using a small Bunsen burner, she heats the lids, presses in rubber rings for sealing, and prepares the finished cups for shipping.

A startup capitalizes on waste

The bioplastic tableware is just one of AirX Carbon’s product lines. At the startup’s headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City, 20 employees work in a small space: engineers, product designers and marketing specialists.

AirX Carbon was founded in 2019. “It was a difficult start,” says Anh Duong Tiet, one of the two founders and now co-CEO. “Shortly after we founded the company, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and we had a very hard time getting our products out to the public.” But that gave them time to refine their products. “In hindsight, that was a good thing,” says Anh. “It meant we were able to really take off after the pandemic.”

Today, AirX Carbon’s best-selling products are its organic pallets, which are made from agricultural waste.

“We have a customer from Japan to thank for that,” says Thanh Le, the second co-founder and CEO of AirX Carbon. Anh and Thanh met at university, where they were both studying biomaterials engineering. “It is well known in Japan that Vietnam is still heavily agricultural and that there are large quantities of bio-waste available here at a low cost,” says Thanh.

“So they asked us if we could produce pallets from agricultural waste.” Fortunately, Anh and Thanh had already conducted research on this topic at university: not only with biochar, but also with dried plant waste such as coconut or cocoa shells, mixed with natural binders.

Production began in 2022. At first, the pallets were still too heavy and had technical flaws, but they now meet the logistics industry’s requirements and can also compete price-wise with conventional wooden and plastic pallets.

Major corporations like Coca-Cola are already shipping their products on AirX Carbon’s biodegradable pallets. “Google, too, which manufactures its cell phones here in Vietnam,” says Anh. The pallets made from plant waste are much lighter than conventional pallets, biodegrade harmlessly —and their production requires no new raw materials. More than half of AirX Carbon’s products are shipped overseas, while the company sells the rest in Asia.

Chocolate wrappers made from cocoa waste

The chocolate maker Marou is also looking for ways to get more out of the cacao plant. Its production facility is located very close to Farmer Hoang’s farm, which supplies the company with fermented and dried cacao beans. Depending on the season, between 80 and 100 people work here.

Marou was founded in 2011 by two French expatriates. Their goal: to produce excellent chocolate — and to work directly and exclusively with Vietnamese cocoa farmers, paying them fair prices for their products. The only condition is that the farming families must produce sustainable cocoa and thereby contribute to the environment and biodiversity.

The concept paid off: Today, Marou exports its chocolate to various European countries, including France, Belgium, Sweden and Germany. Marou products are also popular in Saudi Arabia and Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

Each year, the company ships ten containers of chocolate abroad, which is equivalent to about seven million chocolate bars. In Vietnam, Marou products are sold in chic flagship stores called “Maison Marou” in major cities.

For a special edition chocolate launched on Earth Day 2024, Marou used chocolate wrappers made entirely from cocoa plant waste for the first time. The company received an international design award in Paris in 2025 for this innovation.

“The idea was good, but the result isn’t perfect yet,” says Lien Dinh Thi Ngoc, who is in charge of purchasing at Marou. “We want to keep working on this, even though it’s quite labor-intensive. Because our goal is to be able to use not just the beans, but the entire cocoa plant.”

Or, as farmer Hoang puts it: Nothing that nature provides is waste. Everything has value.