Fine-chocolate exporter builds fame on remote African island

Accra

CLAUDIO Corallo is a reluctant celebrity as Africa's only maker and exporter of fine chocolate.

His delicacies sell at US$26.50 for a 160-gramme box in Palo Alto, California, in a shop a stone's throw away from a Louis Vuitton store that sells handbags from US$1,200. But he eschews trade shows, labelling, fancy packaging, and insists on calling himself an agronomist.

"I'm not a chocolatier," said Mr Corallo, 63, who wears faded jeans cut off at the knee and a tiny pocket knife dangling on a string from his belt. "The fact that I'm making chocolate is completely accidental."

Mr Corallo, a native of Florence in Italy, grows cocoa and transforms it into high-quality bars on the small West African nation of Sao Tome and Principe, an archipelago that was the world's biggest cocoa producer in 1908. Very few companies worldwide control the entire process from the harvest to the final product, and almost all that do are based in South America…