A Career In Chocolate • Sabrina Mustopo
(CEO and Founder of Krakakoa || Indonesia)
“I flipped through a course catalog and found a major called International Agriculture and Rural Development — it was a light bulb moment for me! I was interested in equitable and sustainable development, but I never thought I could pursue something like that as a profession. My parents were quite skeptical — ’You run into the other room when there’s an insect, you want to study agriculture now? Really?’
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I got my degree, then went into consulting with a focus on agriculture and economic development. After six years, I became frustrated that most of my work was putting things on paper — I wanted a hands-on experience where I could judge the real impact of my work. At the time I was writing a report on the state of the Indonesian agriculture sector, and learned a lot about the challenges in the cocoa industry. We grow so much cocoa here, but have many issues with sustainability, with farmers not making money, and with poor quality produce. I thought, is there a business opportunity here? Can I start a chocolate company and tackle these issues? I played with the idea for a year, but wasn’t brave enough to just start the business. As a personal exploration project, I went to Belgium to learn how to make chocolate, then met with farmers to learn about how to grow cocoa. I felt ready to do this full-time!
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There’s really never a boring day at the company. When sales are good, production may be the bottleneck, and it needs to be fixed. When production is good, the quality may be going down because we’ve increased the volume — so there is always a moving target, always something to work and improve on. But the biggest challenge for me was figuring out how to lead. When you run a company, you don’t always know whether you’re making the right decisions. How do you motivate different people, build culture, overcome self-doubt? I think I’ve grown the most stepping into this role. But these challenges are worth it, because our farmers produce the most beautiful, highest quality, and tastiest cocoa beans in the country.”
