On October 25^th, 2017, Crop Enhancement CEO Kevin Chen introduced CropCoat® to attendees at the annual partnership meeting of the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) in Washington, D.C., receiving public recognition from a top chocolate manufacturer.

Each year, this event brings leaders from industry, government, nonprofits and academia together to share new developments in the global cocoa industry. The 2017 conference theme, Accelerating Sustainability through Technology and Innovation, focused on innovation and highlighted several new technologies which aim to improve sustainability outcomes for cocoa farmers around the world. Crop Enhancement was invited to join a limited number of companies in the WCF’s inaugural Innovation Marketplace.

Kevin hosted a poster at the Innovation Marketplace and spoke about Crop Enhancement’s CropCoat® product which is applied onto cocoa pods and forms a non-toxic protective layer that shields pods from pest and disease damage. We were very pleased with the high level of interest and engagement at our booth from chocolate companies, cocoa growers, cocoa processors, certification bodies, and governmental groups. We shared with them about our ongoing field trials that are showing that CropCoat can significantly reduce yield losses caused by one of the cocoa industry’s most destructive pests, the cocoa pod borer, using sustainable chemistry. We also described ongoing evaluations on the use of CropCoat in treatment regimens to control fungal diseases including black pod. The many discussions we had at the meeting and the excellent networking were just the beginning of dialogues that continue.

We thank the WCF for this opportunity to contribute to this year’s program and look forward to connecting again in October 2018 in São Paolo, Brazil.