Strange to tell, but I get a big kick out of seeing Divine chocolate on the shelves of a store. One of the strange aspects of our business is that we have little control over exactly where and when the chocolate appears. We sell to distributors and to the supermarket chains, to small stores and to catalogues. Normally the chocolate goes from our warehouse to someone elese’s warehouse, and from that moment on... it is literally and metaphorically out of our hands. Even when we sell direct to a single store, we don’t know when they put it on the shelves. And one of the questions we most commonly get asked is, ‘Where can I buy Divine?’ Sometimes our answer is a little too vague. Consumers don’t want to know that ‘we are available in 70% of the stores of this supermarket chain’. They want to know that we’re available in the store on the corner of their street. I remember visiting Vancouver last summer and walking by chance into a coffee shop in downtown Langley. There on the counter was the full range of Divine chocolate. I asked the store manager where they got the chocolate and he didn’t know. The chocolate was ordered by the head office of the chain he worked for and all he did was put it on the shelves. ‘And smile nicely when people say how much they like it,’ he added.

It’s the same for the farmers. They want to know where people can buy Divine Chocolate. Yesterday Cecilia Donkor began her speaking tour as part of the celebrations of Fair Trade month. She went to the Linden Hills Co-op in Minneapolis and will visit Ten Thousand Villages in St Paul,MN today. We also found out that Kowalski's, a chain of stores in the Twin Cities will be stocking Divine by the week's end.. Her colleague, Cecilia Appianim, is in Rochester New York, speaking to the Wegmans chain of stores. From there both Cecilias go on to Madison, WI for a series of meetings and public appearances. Details are elsewhere on the website.

So please take this as a general invitation to write and let me know where you’ve found Divine Chocolate. I’ll be delighted to hear from you and it will help us build up a picture of how our chocolate is making the connection between cocoa farmers in Ghana and chocolate lovers everywhere.