Pam Thornton

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Pam Thornton is a veteran physical cocoa and coffee trader with an in-depth understanding of the entire supply chain. Her work has included setting up and managing export operations for large trade houses (Sucden/Phibro/Dreyfus) in many origins - West Africa, Asia and Latin America – to supply leading global chocolate manufacturers and coffee roasters.

She spent the last 10 years of her career with the Armajaro CC+ Commodity Fund, managing assets across the agricultural space. This required the analysis of climatic, agronomic, economic, political and social factors and their impact on price and risk. Part of a dying breed, she has a unique understanding of convergence in the futures markets and the implicit value of physical cocoa.

Now semi-retired, she trades for her own account and continues to spend time upcountry at origin looking at crops. She has several personal investments in farms including a cocoa farm in Bahia and a commercial fruit farm in West Africa.

She was an initial member of the Global Issues Group – the cocoa industry think-tank established in 2000 to deal with the allegations of abusive labour practices within the cocoa supply chain. Because of her extensive field experience, she was prominent in citing poverty and complex geo-political factors behind the issues and cautioned over the difficulty of a single food industry being able to eradicate them. In 2006 she was part of the push for introducing traceability within company supply chains as a necessary first step towards addressing customer concerns over ethical issues.

Pam is a former Chairperson of the Cocoa Merchants’ Association of America MAA and a long-time and current member of both ICE's Cocoa and Coffee Committees and various panels of the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO). She lectures at the annual FCC training program for industry newcomers, is on the board of Cocoa Research UK (CRUK) which sponsors scientific work and regularly presents at conferences providing an independent “reality check” for producers and the chocolate industry on key trends involving production, supply chain problems, the need and potential for modernizing farms and most importantly, price. In 2019 she appeared in the Netflix “Rotten” series on Cocoa.

She studied Economics at Cambridge University (Clare College BA/MA).