Sabrina Mustopo Dan Perjalanannya Mencipta Rasa
Hi, my name is Sabrina. I have this idea about cocoa, can we meet and can we talk? As soon as Sabrina Mustopo wrote her electronic letter. CEO and founder of Krakakoa, a craft chocolate company, this does not necessarily know the person she sent the letter. Armed with an idea, she tried to make it happen. From the letter, the network associated with chocolate began to develop. Sabrina began to recognize WWF, a non-profit organization engaged in environmental conservation. From there, she learned about sustainable livelihoods program (sustainable livelihood) in Lampung, which then allows Sabrina met with cocoa farmers.
“I don’t know about chocolate at all, no basic understanding,” she said. Initially, Sabrina worked at multinational management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. During her six years working as a consultant for international agriculture and sustainable development, Sabrina read a report on Indonesian agriculture. She was amazed to see a considerable number of Indonesian cocoa production to become the third largest producer country in the world. “But why if you go to a supermarket, Indonesian chocolate choices are very limited? All the best quality chocolates are still imported from Europe.“
That tickled her mind. She began to identify the problem. This Cornell University graduate then studied the chocolate industry carefully. What she found was that cocoa production in Indonesia was decreasing the longer, the income of cocoa farmers was very minimal, the quality of chocolate had declined. Sabrina saw an opportunity to do something to overcome this problem.
Let’s think of how to pay farmers a lot more and produce high quality products. Let’s start a business to solve all the problems that we see. This is the initial idea of the establishment of Krakakoa in 2014. The first six months, she spent time on research. “I don’t know what kind of cocoa plants are, where are the farmers,” she recalled the trip to Krakakoa. Even though they work in the agricultural sector, most are only giving advice or reports so that they rarely go to the field or interact with farmers. This is what made her angry, ” We never get our hands dirty“. Therefore, the idea of Krakakoa made her very excited. This means there is something real that she does and has a direct impact.