Cemoi has big ambitions for chocolate markets

Cemoi, France s number one chocolate maker, ramps up its image with a new logo, new products and a clear drive to become the number two industrial chocolate supplier in Europe. "We have big ambitions for the market," Patrick Poirrier, CEO of family-owned Cemoi that posted €700m in turnover last year, told reporters at the company s first ever press conference in its 46 year history. Currently, the firm uses 3.5 per cent, or 100 000 tonnes of the world s cocoa bean harvest each year, and is the number three supplier of cocoa products for business to business trade in Europe. "Our objective is to become the number two supplier for industrial use," said Poirrier, the third generation in his family to head up this private bean-to-bar chocolate firm with 3000 employees.
In a fifty-fifty split, Perpignan-based Cemoi supplies cocoa ingredients for industrial chocolate makers as well as finished products for private label and consumer brand demand. Cemoi already has a major footprint in the French chocolate market, to a large extent through private label business. The firm, for example, has a 6 per cent slice of the private label market at Christmas time. But shaking off the anonymity of a private label supplier, and revealing ambitions for the Cemoi brand itself, at the conference on Thursday the firm presented its new range of own brand chocolate, rubber-stamped as organic and fairtrade. In a six set series, three of the bars use cocoa sourced from Equator, with the remaining three sourcing beans from Sao Tome. Beans from Equator, according Cemoi, give a specific aromatic, floral note while chocolate made from the Sao Tome cacao beans proffers a sweet and fruity aroma. Further launch activities in 2009 will see Cemoi roll out a new, own brand premium chocolate range with an artisan flavour for Christmas 2009, signed off by chocolate chef Philippe Urraca. In addition to the nine French plants, Cemoi has factories in Ivory Coast, Germany, the UK and Poland.