The cocoa industry has built a serious deforestation standard, but the harder task is getting anyone to believe it
This month the World Cocoa Foundation and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT published a new Active Deforestation Risk Assessment Methodology for cocoa supply chains. Ten of the sector's biggest names helped build it, among them Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Lindt & Sprüngli, Mondelēz, Hershey, Olam Food Ingredients and Sucden.
It follows a year of groundwork, from the first independent assessment of the forest maps companies rely on to a formal launch with a CGIAR research centre as science partner. By the standards of voluntary industry initiatives, this is serious work.
The methodology gives practical guidance on the questions that decide whether a deforestation claim stands up: the quality of plot-level data, the choice of forest baselines, how conflicting satellite evidence should be weighed, and what verification looks like when the datasets disagree. The Alliance's senior scientist Louis Reymondin put the problem plainly: “No single dataset can fully capture the complexity of tropical agricultural landscapes.”
The methodology exists to stop risk decisions being made on incomplete or low-quality evidence, which matters as much to the smallholder wrongly flagged as non-compliant as it does to the company doing the flagging.
So the sector has done the hard technical part. What it has not done is the part that decides whether any of it counts.
A standard is judged twice. Once by the specialists who read it, and once by everyone who never will: the officials drafting enforcement guidance, the journalists writing the next exposé, the retailers reviewing sourcing policies, the consumers deciding what a chocolate wrapper's claims are worth. The second judgment is the one that shapes markets and regulation, and the cocoa sector enters it carrying twenty years of accumulated doubt.
The public story of cocoa has largely been written by the industry's critics. Mighty Earth has spent a decade producing reports with titles like Behind the Wrapper and Sweet Nothings, documenting forest loss in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire and arguing that 30 to 40 per cent of cocoa remains untraceable. The pattern of those campaigns is always the same. Industry makes a commitment, the commitment is measured against satellite imagery, and the gap becomes the headline. Fair or not, that is the inheritance every new cocoa initiative receives at birth.
Which makes the attack line on the DRA methodology entirely predictable. There is no globally applied standard for deforestation risk assessment, so the companies being assessed have written one. The sector is marking its own homework. Expect that sentence, or something very close to it, in every sceptical write-up. The methodology's actual strengths, the multi-stakeholder process, the involvement of producing-country institutions and the independence of the science partner, will not rebut the charge on their own, because rebuttals that sit in a technical annex reach nobody.
The regulatory backdrop raises the stakes. The EU Deforestation Regulation has now been postponed twice and applies to large and medium operators from 30 December 2026. The delay was won in Brussels through familiar channels: technical submissions, member state pressure, warnings about IT systems and administrative burden. What was not won anywhere is the argument about the sector itself. The decisions still to come, from the Commission's simplification measures to country benchmarking and enforcement priorities, will be shaped by what officials, politicians and journalists believe about cocoa at least as much as by what companies can document. Compliance buys entry to the market. Belief buys the benefit of the doubt, and the benefit of the doubt is what determines how a regulation lands on you.
We made this argument about EUDR before. The deadline may keep moving, but the narrative does not wait, and the sectors covered by the regulation have spent heavily on the first while leaving the second to their opponents. The cocoa sector has now produced the strongest possible raw material for changing that. A methodology built with independent scientists, welcomed by producing-country stakeholders and designed to protect farmers from bad data is a story worth telling. It will not tell itself.
Telling it properly means independent voices carrying the message rather than corporate affairs departments. It means the scientists, the cooperatives and the producing-country institutions who shaped the methodology explaining publicly why it is rigorous, before the self-certification charge is filed rather than after. It means evidence from the farm gate, where the methodology's fairness provisions have their real effect, rather than from the conference stage. And it means measuring the right thing. Coverage is not the goal. The goal is a shift in what the audiences who matter actually believe about cocoa and deforestation, which is measurable if you set out to measure it.
The DRA methodology deserves to succeed, and not only for the companies behind it. If it fails, the vacuum will be filled by fragmented private standards, inconsistent enforcement and the same cycle of pledge and exposé that has defined the sector since 2017. Standards do not earn trust by existing. They earn it when the people judging them believe the work is honest, and belief is built deliberately or not at all.
SPQR is a digital-first strategic communications agency that works with organisations in contested sectors to measure and close the gap between what they can prove and what their audiences believe. If you are building the evidence, we can help build the belief.
Get in touch at info@wearespqr.com.
