Who Supplies Tanzania’s Chocolate: An Import and Distribution Guide

Almost everything written about chocolate and Tanzania is written from the farm end: who grows the cacao, who ferments it, who is trying to build a factory. This piece looks from the other end — the shelf. If you are buying, importing or distributing finished chocolate in Tanzania, what you are operating in is an import market, and the trade data says so bluntly.

The asymmetry, in one line

In 2024 Tanzania imported roughly 2,147 tonnes of chocolate and cocoa preparations worth about USD 5.07 million CIF. In the same year it exported 9.98 tonnes worth about USD 4,842 FOB. That is not a trade deficit in the ordinary sense; it is the near-total absence of an export side.

HS 1806 is the customs heading for “chocolate and other food preparations containing cocoa” — finished and semi-finished product. It is deliberately not the heading for raw beans. Import values rose about 34% between 2022 and 2024 while exports stayed in the tens of thousands of dollars and bounced around year to year.

Where it actually comes from

One origin dominates. South Africa supplied about 63.5% of Tanzania’s 2024 chocolate import value on its own; add the United Kingdom (9.2%) and Kenya (5.8%) and three origins account for roughly 78.5% of the bill.

Note what South Africa and Kenya are not: cocoa-growing countries. They are regional manufacturing and FMCG distribution hubs. Chocolate reaching Dar es Salaam from Johannesburg or Nairobi is, in most cases, product manufactured there or imported into those markets first and re-distributed — which means the practical supply chain for a Tanzanian retailer usually runs through a regional distributor, not through a European factory directly.

Two different markets wearing one customs code

The unit values in that table are the most useful thing in this article for anyone sourcing. They do not scatter randomly — they cluster into two distinct trades:

• Branded retail chocolate at roughly USD 5–21 per kilogram: South Africa, the UK, Kenya, Switzerland. This is packaged confectionery for supermarkets, hotels, duty-free and the tourist trade.
• Bulk and ingredient-grade material at well under USD 1 per kilogram: Türkiye (USD 0.32), the UAE (USD 0.36), Indonesia (USD 0.27). By weight this is enormous — Türkiye alone shipped 536 tonnes in 2024, more weight than South Africa, for about 5% of the money.

The subheading breakdown confirms it. In 2024, retail bars and blocks (HS 180631 and 180632) were 62.5% of import value but only 30% of import weight, at about USD 4.88/kg. Cocoa powder, bulk preparations over 2 kg and other preparations (HS 180610, 180620, 180690) were 37.5% of value but 70% of weight, at about USD 1.27/kg. If you are quoted a price for “chocolate” in this market, which of those two trades you are in matters more than the origin country does.

The part that should bother anyone who read our Cacao coverage

Tanzania imports cocoa ingredients, not just finished bars. In 2024 that included 295 tonnes of sweetened cocoa powder (HS 180610) and 38 tonnes of bulk preparations in blocks over 2 kg (HS 180620) — the inputs for biscuits, bakery, beverages and confectionery made locally. Alongside those sits a much larger 1,165 tonnes under HS 180690, “other preparations”, at about USD 1.38/kg; that heading is a catch-all and we would not claim all of it is industrial feedstock, but the price says very little of it is branded retail chocolate.

The point stands either way: Tanzania buys cocoa ingredients from abroad while exporting the overwhelming majority of its own cacao crop as raw, unprocessed beans, mostly to grinders in Malaysia and Indonesia.

So the ingredient side of the loop is imported too. Beans leave Tanzania raw and cocoa ingredients arrive back as finished imports, having had the value added somewhere else. That is the value-chain gap in its plainest form, and it is the same gap from the opposite side of the fence. The raw-material half of this story — production, farmgate prices, the 2025–26 price collapse, who the bean exporters are — lives on Cacao.tz. This portal deliberately covers only what happens after the beans are fermented.

Exports: consignments, not an industry

Tanzania’s HS 1806 exports are small, regional and erratic, and the pattern of them is the finding. In 2022 the main destination was Burundi (9.7 t). In 2023 it was Malawi, Somalia and Oman (71 t in total). In 2024 it was Rwanda, and the whole year came to 10 tonnes and under USD 5,000.

No stable customer base, no repeat destinations, order-of-magnitude swings year to year — that is the signature of occasional consignments and cross-border regional trade, not of a manufacturing sector with export accounts. A country with a finished-chocolate industry does not export 10 tonnes one year and 71 the next to an entirely different set of countries.

Processing capacity: verified, and it’s small

The relevant statistical classification is ISIC Rev.4 class 1073, “manufacture of cocoa, chocolate and sugar confectionery.” We can now confirm the earlier lead on this: Tanzania’s 2013 Census of Industrial Production — the only NBS publication that tabulates Tanzanian industry at this level of classification detail — lists exactly one establishment with 10 or more employees under ISIC 1073: IVORI LTD, a privately-owned firm in Iringa with 20–49 employees, operating since 1984.

Three things keep this from being a clean, final number. The census only covers establishments with 10 or more employees — 47,921 smaller Tanzanian establishments (1–9 persons) are outside its scope entirely by design, so a small confectionery workshop could exist below this threshold and simply not appear. The census covers Tanzania Mainland only, not Zanzibar. And its reference year is 2013, now well over a decade old — we have no NBS equivalent covering Zanzibar or a more recent mainland year. We checked UNIDO’s INDSTAT4 international database for a corroborating or more current figure; its site blocked automated access, so that remains an open follow-up rather than a confirmed cross-check.

What we can say is bounded by what we have actually checked. The businesses we have been able to document turning Tanzanian beans into finished chocolate inside the country number five, and they are listed in our directory: Munny Chocolate, Zanzibar Craft Chocolates, Mababu Chocolate, Chocolate Mamas (operating status unconfirmed) and Kokoa Kamili, which is a fermentary rather than a bar maker. Against USD 5 million a year of imports and a single 10+-employee establishment nationally as of 2013, that is a very small domestic manufacturing base — and the trade data above is consistent with it. See our makers directory for the detail on each.

Who the buyers and distributors are

This is the thinnest part of the picture and we would rather say so than pad it. We have not been able to identify and verify the named confectionery importers or distributors who actually move this USD 5 million of product — the FMCG wholesalers, supermarket buying desks and hotel supply contracts that sit between the customs entry and the shelf. Tanzanian import and distribution businesses in this category disclose very little publicly, and we are not prepared to list companies we have not confirmed are active in this trade.

What the trade data does tell a prospective buyer is structural, and it is worth more than a stale company list:

• Your likely counterparty is regional, not European. Roughly 70% of import value arrives from South Africa, the UK and Kenya; the realistic route to supply runs through a South African or Kenyan distributor.
• Decide which trade you are in first. Retail branded product and sub-dollar bulk ingredient material are different suppliers, different margins and different customs lines, even though both are HS 1806.
• The import market is growing, slowly. Up about 34% in value over 2022–2024, on broadly flat volumes — meaning the mix is shifting toward higher-value product, not just more of it.
• Domestic substitution is marginal today. Five documented makers against USD 5 million of imports means local sourcing is a specialty and provenance play, not a volume alternative.

If you operate in this trade as an importer, distributor or manufacturer, we would genuinely like to correct and expand this page — that is a standing invitation.

How to read these figures

All trade figures here come from the UN Comtrade public preview tier for reporter Tanzania, HS 1806, periods 2022–2024, retrieved 8 October 2026. Two caveats matter. First, every row carries isReported: false — these are Comtrade’s mirror and estimated figures, built largely from what Tanzania’s trading partners reported, not from Tanzania’s own customs submission. Second, partner-level rows reconcile exactly to the national total in every year and both directions, which is a good internal-consistency sign but does not make the underlying estimates official. Unit values are our own calculation (value divided by net weight) and inherit any error in either figure. We rate this source tier B and would upgrade a Tanzania Revenue Authority or National Bureau of Statistics customs series over it without hesitation.