Inside The Global Cocoa Crisis With Mondelēz's Chief Cocoa Officer | CGF 2026

Hello everyone, this is Omnitalk Retail.

I am Chris Walton and we are coming to you live once again from the Consumer Goods Forums Global Summit in Vienna, Austria.

And we are of course in the CGF Leadership Studio, which is sponsored by Vuzion.

Now joining me is Darren o'.

Brien.

Can't wait to talk to Darren.

He's got a great personality.

Darren o' Brien is the Chief Corporate and Government Affairs Officer and everybody, the Chief Cocoa Officer of Mondelez International.

Darren, welcome to omnitalk.

Thanks for joining us, Chris.

It's an absolute pleasure.

Yeah, so I've never heard a title like that before.

I'm sure you get that all the time.

But why the combination?

What was the logic there?

Well, it didn't start that way, okay.

It started off as the Chief Corporate and Government Affairs Officer.

We then had what was effectively a crisis in cocoa.

And as a business, we buy a very significant amount of cocoa.

I gotta imagine, I gotta imagine.

And it's a complex supply chain, you know, from several million farms in West Africa all the way through to places like Brazil.

And we want to take an end to end approach and take a long term strategic approach that's not just about managing year to year.

But what are the things we need to do to secure that supply chain, to make it more predictable, both in price, in terms of supply and make sure we can still make the chocolate that people love.

So hence we got a Chief Cocoa Officer and a cocoa enterprise that I have responsibility for.

Do you have any idea how many other Chief Cocoa officers there are in the world?

Do you like get together?

Is it like people's sexiest man of the Year?

Like, do you guys get together?

And like, I would like to think so, but then I saw someone else with the title at Mars the other day and I was a bit deflated.

Oh, really?

So maybe we might have to have a Chief Cocoa Officer conference somewhere in Africa and enjoy.

It definitely sounds like a happy hour brewing somewhere along the line.

All right, CGS Vienna, CGF Vienna.

Their theme is the adaptive edge.

So it's about being adaptive for AI, being adaptive with supply chain, being adaptive to the needs of the world, the environment at large.

So let's go into the cocoa crisis that you mentioned.

What did that experience teach you personally about adaptability?

Yeah, well, in many ways we had a good look at ourselves and, you know, some of the things would seem obvious, but technology's helped us sort of get a better understanding.

So I'll give you a couple of examples.

There are two big regions of cocoa in the world.

Okay.

There's over in West Africa and then there's the Andean region where there's places like Ecuador and Brazil and Nigeria and so on.

The weather patterns for both are different.

You tend to get different conditions.

You never get sort of a simultaneous conversion of the same weather.

So hence it makes sense to spread where you're sourcing from across both regions.

We were heavily dependent in West Africa.

We're now growing our origin diversity.

And that seems like a simple thing to do until you take into account beans have different flavour profiles, they give you different types of dark chocolate notes all the way through to what we use in milk chocolate.

So we had to make sure we had both the recipe flexibility as well as the sourcing flexibility to be able to bring that together.

We're also looking at things such as large scale farming.

We have around 2.2 million farmers supplying cocoa in West Africa.

They have a couple of hectares each and make about half a kilo of cocoa per hectare.

Okay.

We're having a look at what sort of technologies, things like irrigation, fertiliser and so on, and technology in terms of predictive capabilities, disease resistance and so on to get better productivity and yield.

So expanding that is one of our sources.

And there's some amazing technology coming through in terms of how you might be able to use cells of cocoa plants to actually make cocoa butter, which is the key ingredient.

And that's potentially what we're calling the cocoa of the future.

So where are you in that diversification journey?

Like, are you at mile one, mile 24 of the marathon?

How would you sum that up?

Well, we're one year in, one year in.

Okay.

But we have agreements now for around about 50,000 hectares of large scale farms.

We have investments in around four startups who are actually looking at this sort of fermented cocoa technology.

We've significantly increased our sourcing capabilities from the Andean region in places like Ecuador.

So it's only been a year, but we are definitely seeing a rapid sort of scale up in terms of the capability of the pillars we're building, but not necessarily yet the cocoa volume from those pillars.

Got it, Got it.

Okay, good.

Glad I asked that.

All right, so my next question would be, you know, the CGF Human Rights Coalition is also a key part of the summit.

It's also one of the most prominent sessions here.

And you also are very involved in this idea called Coco Life.

Can you explain that?

And how is that actually changing things or what is it designed to do?

Yeah, so look, as you talk about Human rights.

And there's been a lot of focus for all the right reasons in terms of making sure that we have a child labour free cocoa supply chain.

We spend millions and millions of dollars, as do our peers, in terms of remediation and monitoring programs around ensuring that you don't just say you cannot have child labour, but you look at what are the causes of it and how do you address those causes.

So how do you ensure that there's access to education for the children so that they actually can go to school?

How do you look at technology that can be advanced on the farm to grow productivity and to enable the farmers themselves to get better yields potentially through improved farming methods and reduce the, let's call it the temptation to perhaps use child labour to actually get the supply as well as in, you know, in making investments right across sort of the cocoa supply chain to make it more resilient and ultimately to create that cycle where if you get better farm incomes, you get more choice, you get more choice to be able to invest, to be able to ensure that children are given and provided with education so they can become potentially the farmers of the future and also look at alternatives and other crops that can complement alongside cocoa.

One of the things we have learned is that barrier crops or planting crops on the outside of cocoa plantations makes them more disease resistant.

And disease of cocoa trees is one of the challenges we also face, really.

So it's an area that we obviously put a great importance on, as do all of our peers.

And we're looking at how we can have programs around human rights, both due diligence as well as the monitoring, the remediation programs that mean by doing it collectively as an industry, you're far more likely to get a better outcome than people just trying to do it by themselves.

And hence the goals here of this conference as well.

Correct.

So one of the reasons I created Omnitalk was to give the listeners and the watchers who are watching on YouTube an inside view into what executives have to do on a daily basis.

What are the things that confront them, how do they make decisions, how do they go about their day?

And one of the things I find really interesting about your job, both probably dynamics of both titles of it, is you have board level update responsibility.

You're expected to provide updates on what you're doing to the board regularly.

Was that always the case or did you grow into that over time?

No, I got dumped into it.

You got dumped into it.

Okay, see, now we're getting real.

All right, this is great.

Go back 18 months I was in Australia, I was running Australia, New Zealand, Japan as one of our 20 odd business units around the world.

I had responsibilities for a regional president and I would do reviews with sort of the CEO on probably a biannual basis.

The beauty about Australia, it's an island, it's a fair way, a lot of freedom and autonomy free.

Fast forward to now.

I sit about 12ft from the CEO, about 8ft from the CFO and I've got the Chief Operating Officer on my left shoulder.

So there's nowhere to hide.

And every morning in this role now, particularly with corporate and government affairs, there's always something new and surprising.

My inbox is my morning delight.

Sometimes not such a delight and it often is time sensitive and it can cut across geographies.

It can start in Washington D.C. and very quickly be a major issue in Europe.

Go back to February last year.

We were looking at the prospect of billions of dollars of impacts from things such as tariffs and restrictive trade and so on.

Those issues focus you very quickly.

So it's a fascinating job.

And then as you mentioned, the board needs to be updated.

And also if you have a, a good board as we do, the ability to also leverage their strategic insight and experience from other industries serves as a great sort of tool to leverage in managing a business like ours.

So Darren, what are the puts and takes with that upscaling of responsibility that you just described?

And then how have you had to adapt your leadership style as well?

Yeah, look in terms of one of the things that particularly in a global role like mine, you have to be managing through people.

It's not necessarily the work that I do, it's the potential, the capabilities I unlock from my team around the world.

Hopefully I provide some insights, ask some questions that provoke some thinking that may not have otherwise been there.

But fortunately for me, I rarely ever find myself in a position where I'm telling someone what to do.

I'm trying to say how does one plus one equal three in in terms of getting better outcomes and trying to stay abreast of what's going on in a fast moving world.

And one of the things particularly here at CGF and looking at what AI and that can enable what may have required you to send an email or make a phone call and wait for a brief to come back, read that, maybe have follow up questions you can get very quickly now using AI and then really put your efforts into what's the so what, what do we do now?

Not actually sort of the gathering, compilation and assessment.

You can get that.

Yeah, Then you've got to know what to do about it.

Yeah, right, right, right, right.

Yeah.

And to your point, like you're leading through others on your team at Mondelez, but also leading through others in the industry, which is why you're here.

So I'm curious, I want to get you out of here on this with that idea of collaboration and collective action at the forefront of this question.

What do you think what needs to happen in the global cocoa production system by say like 2035 or the next 10 years?

What change does the industry most need to make to improve things?

Look, I think the sharing of technology is important, okay.

Even though when it comes down to whether it be a Milka or a Cadbury chocolate bar or M&Ms, we compete at a brand level, we have consumers and a lot of them actually buy a couple across a portfolio of products.

But we all depend on that cocoa to be grown and supplied.

And so things such as together cocoa, which is a coalition of a number of the large chocolate manufacturers looking at what you can do in a pre competitive environment right back at the farm in terms of the practices, how do you get disease resistance, how do you potentially share cocoa crop technology around more resistant cocoa plants, what you can do and some of the methodologies in large scale farming, rehabilitation of areas to also then reduce carbon emissions.

These are the things where we can both create a better world, ensure that there's a good, more predictable supply of cocoa and also one that enables the whole supply chain to benefit, whether it be the farmer incomes because they've become more productive and they've got better yields through to ensuring that human rights, due diligence and other things are the total norm.

Not something that you constantly have to reinvest in to prevent, but becomes enabled because of the improvements you've made in the supply chain.

That's really interesting.

You're kind of painting the picture of a world in which we're not competing on the commodity, you're competing on what you can do with the commodity that everyone has equal access to and benefits from.

Absolutely.

That's interesting.

I never thought about that.

Well, thank you, Darren.

It's been a pleasure.

It's been a real pleasure.

Yeah, we'll have to do this again sometime.

I look forward to seeing you next year for sure.

100%.

Well, thank you to Darren and thank you to CGF and to Fusion for making all of our coverage with great executives like Darren here possible.

And as always to all of our Omnitalk fans, be careful out there.