Is your organization's value distributed fairly among the stakeholders, for example by limiting remuneration for directors and shareholders?

 

 

Business as Usual lets most of the value flow to a few people

Tony's Chocolonely - Netherlands

Tony's Chocolonely positions itself as a mission-driven chocolate brand focused on ending exploitation in cocoa supply chains. However, questions have been raised about how fairly value is actually distributed within its own structure. According to Het Financieele Dagblad, over a ten-year period the company’s sole executive received around €30 million in remuneration, while the total premiums paid to roughly twelve thousand African cocoa farmers amounted to about €12.5 million in the same period.

This comparison highlights a potential imbalance between governance rewards and upstream impact. While Tony’s Chocolonely has contributed to raising awareness of inequality in cocoa production and pays Fairtrade premiums, critics argue that a large share of the economic value still concentrates at the top of the corporate structure rather than being proportionally redistributed to producers.

In that sense, the company illustrates a broader tension in “impact brands”: strong ethical branding and supply-chain initiatives can coexist with relatively traditional, shareholder- and executive-centric value distribution models. The result is a hybrid system where some impact exists, but overall income inequality is increased.

 

Future Entrepreneurs ensure that the value is distributed fairly

Equal Exchange - USA

Equal Exchange is an American worker cooperative that takes a fundamentally different approach to value distribution. As a co-owned enterprise, it is structured so that workers participate in governance and decision-making, which directly influences pay structures and sourcing policies. One of its defining features is a relatively narrow wage ratio of around 5:1 between highest and lowest earners, which limits internal inequality.

On the supply side, Equal Exchange works directly with farmer cooperatives rather than large intermediary traders. These cooperatives receive at least Fair Trade minimum prices plus additional premiums. Importantly, farmers are not only paid more fairly but also participate in deciding how community premiums are invested, reinforcing shared ownership of development outcomes.

This model embeds fairness into both ends of the value chain: internally through cooperative governance and externally through long-term, transparent trade relationships. Instead of concentrating value among executives or shareholders, a larger share is structurally retained by workers and redistributed to producer communities. It's worth noting though that farmers remain suppliers with better prices but they do not have equity or vote in the company itself.

Kuapa Kokoo - Ghana

Where Tony's Chocolonely shows value concentrating in executive pay despite ethical branding, and Equal Exchange shows what fair internal distribution can look like at small scale, Kuapa Kokoo shows a third possibility: farmers holding real equity in a chocolate company, but only a minority share of it.

Kuapa Kokoo — "good cocoa farmer" in Twi — was founded in 1993 by farmer representative Nana Frimpong Abrebrese, after Ghana liberalized its cocoa market and opened the door for farmers to organize their own trading cooperative instead of selling only through the state buyer. Today it's the largest Fairtrade-certified cocoa cooperative in the world: over 100,000 member-farmers across roughly 1,300 communities in six cocoa-growing regions of Ghana, governed through a three-tier democratic structure — community-level committees, district councils, and a National Executive Council elected by a national assembly of members.

In 1997–98, rather than settle for exporting raw beans, the cooperative's members voted to go a step further: they set up their own chocolate company, now known as Divine Chocolate, together with UK partners Twin Trading, The Body Shop, and support from Christian Aid and Comic Relief. When The Body Shop later donated its shares to the cooperative, Kuapa Kokoo's stake rose to 44–45% — making its farmers the largest shareholders in a chocolate company that sells globally, with two seats on Divine's board. Profits flow back as dividends, on top of the Fairtrade minimum price, a $200-per-tonne Fairtrade premium, and 2% of Divine's annual turnover reinvested directly into farmer communities — funding wells, schools, clinics, and literacy programs (over £2 million invested as of 2016).

But 44–45% is a minority stake, not control. Divine's headquarters, its chocolate manufacturing, and the majority of its shares all sit in the UK — the value-add step that actually turns cocoa into chocolate, the part of the supply chain that captures the most profit, still happens outside Africa. Kuapa Kokoo's farmers get a genuine seat at the table and a real share of the upside, which is rare and meaningful in this industry. But as minority shareholders, they don't have the power to block a sale or restructuring of Divine if the other shareholders wanted one.

 

What you can do

If you want to distribute value more like a Future Entrepreneur here are some practical tips:

• Set internal remuneration limits: Introduce a transparent reward ratio (e.g., 5:1 or 10:1) between highest and lowest paid employees to reduce excessive internal inequality.
• Share ownership or profits: Use employee ownership schemes, cooperatives, or profit-sharing models so value is not concentrated solely with founders or shareholders.
• Strengthen supply-chain equity: Work directly with producer cooperatives, pay living-income benchmarks, and include suppliers in decision-making about premiums and reinvestment.