Willie (right) inspecting the cocoa beans at the new Cocoa Bean Collection centre today as Malaysian Cocoa Board Sarawak officials look on.
KOTA SAMARAHAN (Dec 21): The RM4.66 million Cocoa Bean and Chocolate Processing Centre here will help Malaysian Cocoa Board Sarawak branch achieve greater heights when it is fully completed in the first quarter of next year, said Plantation Industries and Commodities Deputy Minister Willie Mongin.
He believed the centre could be a ‘game changer’ for Sarawak’s cocoa industry.
“PPBKC is one of the main components of the Sarawak Cocoa Cluster Complex. It took 18 months to complete, and has already been operating in stages since Sept 2020,” he said at the handing over of the certificate for the completion of the first phase of the project by the contractors to the Board.
The first phase the Cocoa Bean Collection Centre, while the second phase would see the construction of infrastructure such as the Sales Gallery and Cocoa Cafe.
Willie told a press conference later that Sarawak has to venture into value-added cocoa products such as chocolate, cocoa powder and cocoa liquor to reap bigger profits.
He said this was because the price of cocoa at the upstream level is undeniably quite low at the moment.
“In Sarawak, cocoa prices could be more or less RM5 per kilogramme for various grades but if value is added into cocoa in its downstream products, the price can be fairly high,” he said.
He opined that processed cocoa items or downstream products can be sold at higher prices because for example a 200 grammes chocolate bar could fetch RM200, and that was much higher than selling cocoa itself.
Willie thus urged entrepreneurs who were interested in becoming chocolate product producers or its downstream products such as block chocolate, to meet with the Board’s officers.
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