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Naravid Tejavanija
Founder — GOcacao & de'Finnitive Cacao
Origin
Why do the farmers who grow 80–90% of the world's cacao earn 5–7% of what it's worth?
It started at Kad KoKoa, a Thai bean-to-bar producer, where I first saw what goes into making chocolate from scratch: the farms, and the fermentation stage over which a batch of beans changes across roughly 96 hours.
GOcacao began as a high school research project at Shrewsbury International School Bangkok in 2024 and has since grown into a commercially deployed technology, independently validated on real farms and recognised at international competitions across three continents.
Farmers generally have no record of how a batch fermented, and so no way to evidence its quality. Without that evidence there is no basis for a premium, and without a premium there is little incentive to invest in fermentation practice.
The algorithm was tuned in the field rather than in a laboratory, across 8 sites in Thailand and 5 tonnes of cacao. Samples were assessed by a third-party grading authority: 87.25 fully brown beans per 100, against 72.5 for traditional fermentation — a 20.3% improvement.
GOcacao is advised by Asst. Prof. Dr. Tansiphorn Na Nan of Chulalongkorn University, who leads the university's ISTC cacao innovation centre. The aim of the project is to move a larger share of supply chain value towards the producers.
Naravid Tejavanija
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