Cacao is one of the most economically important crops grown in tropical regions, but its cultivation drives a cycle of environmental and financial deprivation. The pressure for short-term yield drives farmers to adopt monoculture systems with high input dependency. But this system is unsustainable, with soil degradation causing yields to drop within ten years of farming. The associated income loss pushes farmers to deforest more fertile land and restart the cycle. As a result, significant biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, and poor labour practices are associated with cacao cultivation, while yields have plateaued.

This system must change, with cacao demand expected to double from 2010-2050. Commitments made by both key industry players and governments have codified this need. At Deep Science Ventures, we see an opportunity to achieve a just transition to sustainable and profitable cacao with innovative solutions that can enhance smallholder productivity and profits, and enroll them as agents of biodiversity enhancement.

We apply a proprietary methodology to venture building called DSV Alpha. This process focuses on starting with the desired outcome and then working backward to identify the technical or economic constraints that must be overcome to deliver the optimal approach.

Our target is to double cacao yield with zero additional deforestation. This outcome pairs cacao’s competing priorities - growth in consumer demand and the need to halt environmental damage. Starting from this outcome, we built a knowledge graph for cacao cultivation, constructing an understanding of the state of the art technologies and constraints that must be overcome. From this, we conceived potential approaches to support the target outcome.

We built our ideas around three key intervention points: the biology that underpins cacao yield, sustainable cultivation practices, and post-harvest processing. Each presents significant opportunities to improve sustainability and yield due to their influence on significant challenges such as disease loss, soil quality, and pollination.

By challenging known constraints on cacao cultivation, we developed a candidate list of approaches that could enable our target outcome. This included ideas such as novel breeding technologies to rapidly develop high performance varieties and digital tools to guide the creation of locally-optimised agroforestry systems. These approaches were assessed collectively to establish our confidence in this opportunity area for venture-backability.

We are confident that both novel technologies and existing technologies can be leveraged in novel ways that form the basis of impactful ventures. Based on the approaches we are most excited about, we have built the profile of an ideal Founder in Residence who would work with us to build a transformative venture from the ground up. We are now seeking mission-aligned partners to collaborate with us and make this vision of sustainable, thriving cacao cultivation a reality.