Nigeria ranks among the world’s leading producers of cocoa. For generations, cocoa beans harvested from farms across the country have travelled thousands of miles beyond its borders, shipped to distant factories where they are transformed into the chocolate bars that fill supermarket shelves across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Yet for many years the irony remained striking: a nation richly endowed with cocoa had almost no chocolate culture of its own.
For a long time, Nigeria grew the beans, but rarely made the chocolate. That paradox lingered in the background of the country’s agricultural story until a new wave of entrepreneurs began asking a simple question: if Nigeria grows so much cocoa, why shouldn’t it also craft its own world-class chocolate?
Among those helping to reshape that narrative is Uzoamaka Izukanne Igweike, founder of Loom Craft Chocolate, a Nigerian bean-to-bar chocolate company that is steadily redefining how chocolate is produced and experienced within the country. Her journey toward that mission began in an unlikely place.
On 9 July 2016, Igweike was wandering through the bustling stores of Manchester city centre in the United Kingdom. It was her first visit to the country, and the experience was both overwhelming and exhilarating. Like many curious travellers encountering a new environment, she allowed herself the simple pleasure of exploring. For Igweike, however, supermarkets held a particular fascination. She loved walking through aisles studying packaged food products, admiring creative branding, appreciating clever packaging design, and imagining which products she might choose and why.
That day she moved from shelf to shelf with curiosity. By evening, her pedometer recorded nearly 24,000 steps. Though physically exhausted, her mind remained alive with impressions from the day. One observation, however, refused to leave her thoughts - Chocolate was astonishingly cheap!
A 400-gram Toblerone bar sold for just £1, roughly the equivalent of ₦400 at the time. Back home in Nigeria, the same bar retailed for nearly ₦3,000.
For Igweike, who loved baking, the discovery was more than surprising, it was perplexing. As a home baker, one of her favourite recipes to make was chocolate cake. Yet sourcing quality chocolate in Nigeria had always been frustrating. Most baking stores stocked compound chocolate, a substitute made with vegetable fats instead of cocoa butter. What she wanted was real chocolate, rich with cocoa, layered with flavour, and capable of delivering the depth that good chocolate cake deserves. However, when genuine chocolate occasionally appeared on store shelves in Nigeria, the price was often prohibitive.
Standing there in Manchester, the contradiction became impossible to ignore. Nigeria is one of the world’s major producers of cocoa, yet the chocolate sold across the country is overwhelmingly imported. At the time, Igweike had never even seen raw cocoa beans, but she knew cocoa was one of Nigeria’s most important agricultural exports. The thought lingered with her long after the trip ended.
Looking back years later, she would reflect that she never imagined that six years after that moment she would become part of putting Nigerian chocolate on the map.
Curiosity soon turned into exploration. Determined to understand how chocolate was made, Igweike began researching the craft behind it. Her search eventually introduced her to the world of bean-to-bar chocolate making. Unlike mass-produced chocolate, bean-to-bar makers begin with raw cocoa beans and oversee every stage of the process themselves, from roasting, to grinding, refining, and tempering the beans to develop the final flavour and texture. It is a method that allows chocolate makers to express the unique characteristics of cocoa grown in different regions.
For Igweike, discovering this craft opened an entirely new world. In 2020, she transformed that curiosity and experimentation into a business, founding Loom Craft Chocolate in Abuja. The idea behind the company was simple but profound: Nigeria should not merely grow cocoa, it should also produce exceptional chocolate.
An Electronic Engineering graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Igweike approached chocolate making with both analytical precision and creative curiosity. From the beginning, Loom Craft Chocolate focused on producing handcrafted chocolate bars and cocoa products using Nigerian cocoa beans and locally sourced ingredients.
Today the company offers a growing collection of chocolate varieties. Among them are 70 percent dark chocolate, 55 percent milk chocolate, dark chocolate with sea salt, mango chilli chocolate, coconut sesame crunch, salted cashew chocolate, kuli-kuli chocolate, strawberry lemongrass chocolate, and vanilla white chocolate. Loom Craft Chocolate also produces baking essentials such as chocolate chips, cocoa nibs, and chocolate blocks, alongside specialty items including milk chocolate spread and curated gift boxes.
Many of these creations reflect an adventurous spirit, combining cocoa with flavours inspired by local culinary traditions and ingredients.
The work being done by Loom Craft Chocolate speaks to a broader reality about Nigeria’s cocoa industry. The country is among the largest cocoa producers in the world, with cultivation spread across several states including Ondo, Osun, Ekiti, Oyo, Ogun, and Cross River. Yet historically, most of the crop has been exported as raw beans, leaving the more profitable stages of processing, manufacturing, and branding to foreign companies.
For Igweike, this imbalance represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Industry estimates suggest that Nigeria’s chocolate confectionery market has been projected to exceed $1.72 billion by 2033, reflecting the country’s growing appetite for chocolate. Yet there are still relatively few local producers. Igweike believes many more Nigerian chocolate makers are needed if the country is to fully capture the value created by its cocoa.
Building a chocolate company in Nigeria, however, comes with significant hurdles. Travel to cocoa farms can be complicated by isolated security concerns, while chocolate production itself requires steady electricity, something many manufacturers continue to struggle with.
Even so, Igweike remains optimistic about the future of Nigerian chocolate. With high-quality cocoa and growing knowledge among local producers, she believes chocolate made in Nigeria can compete internationally once regulatory and export standards are met.
Not long ago, the phrase “Nigerian bean-to-bar chocolate” sounded almost improbable. Today, however, a small but growing community of craft chocolate makers is emerging across the country, each exploring new ways to transform Nigerian cocoa into finished chocolate. Some even operate at the tree-to-bar level, cultivating, harvesting, fermenting, and drying their own cocoa before turning it into chocolate.
Together, these pioneers are gradually reshaping the story of Nigerian cocoa, moving it beyond raw exports and into refined, locally produced chocolate.
At Loom Craft Chocolate, the mission extends beyond producing sweets. The company seeks to inspire creativity and demonstrate what becomes possible when local resources are transformed into exceptional products.
By crafting chocolate from Nigerian cocoa beans and pairing them with imaginative flavours, Uzoamaka Igweike is helping to rewrite a long-standing narrative.
Nigeria’s cocoa story, after all, should not end at the farm gate but in the hands of visionary makers, it is only just beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment