Empirical analysis of the best warehousing practices and its impact on cocoa beans quality: the perspective of cocoa producers

The importance of cocoa to the economy of Ghana cannot be overemphasized. For several decades, cocoa has been the backbone of the country’s economy and plays a major role in employment, foreign exchange earnings, government revenue, education, and infrastructural development of Ghana. Ghana is the world premier supplier of high quality cocoa and second largest exporter of the commodity. Maintaining this high quality of cocoa beans is important in maintaining this status, and in doing so, continue in charging a cocoa premium price. In this study, four best practices of cocoa warehousing were identified from literature and the impact they have on the quality of cocoa beans was explored to much detail using data collected from sixty-six district managers and depot keepers of cocoa warehouses in the Agona East and Agona West districts of the Central region of Ghana. A structural equation model was developed and tested to explore this phenomenon. The findings revealed that the four cocoa warehousing best practices – inventory control, warehouse maintenance, warehouse inspection, and records keeping – were significantly positively associated with quality of cocoa beans. This suggests that all efforts aimed at improving these aspects of cocoa warehousing would reflect positively on the quality of cocoa beans. The study also revealed important challenges to cocoa warehousing in the sampled cocoa warehouses and depots including low capacity of warehouses, poor lighting, poor ventilation, attack by pests and diseases, mishandling, insufficient equipment and facilities, pilferage and damage of cocoa beans, and lack of training for staffs and other workers of cocoa warehousing and storage institutions. These challenges threaten to lower the quality of Ghana’s cocoa beans. The study recommends that greater investment should be channelled into cocoa warehousing as doing so would address most of the challenges identified. The study also calls for further research into other cocoa warehousing practices not tackled in this study to determine how they impact on the quality of cocoa beans.