The market sees futures. We see the physical market underneath.
Futures tell you what the market believes. Official statistics tell you what governments have counted, eighteen months late. Harmattan measures what is actually happening at origin — who is being paid, which buyers have money, and where cocoa is piling up outside normal channels.
Why origin data is different
Cocoa's information gap is not an oversight. It exists because the data that moves the price is not published: farmgate prices are administered rather than discovered, purchasing clerk funding is invisible, and cross-border leakage is inferred from price spreads because nobody counts it.
Plot every public cocoa source on two axes — how fresh it is, and how far upstream it sits — and one quadrant is empty. Everything fast is downstream of the farm. Everything upstream arrives in months. The upstream-and-fresh quadrant is what the panel fills.
What that looks like in practice. StoneX opened 2026 forecasting a 267,000 tonne global surplus for 2026/27. By July it was 25,000. In August COCOBOD's internal estimate of Ghana's crop moved 130,000 tonnes in three weeks.
What no public source can tell you is what the farmers and purchasing clerks in Western North were seeing while those numbers moved.
Purchasing Capacity
Can local buyers actually purchase cocoa?
Purchasing clerk funding status, funding recency, and volume turned away for lack of cash. A leading indicator of official arrivals that no public source reports.
Payment Stress
Are farmers being paid?
Delivery-to-payment duration, share unpaid, and chit usage — measured from transactions, not sentiment.
Realized Farmgate Spread
What price is actually clearing?
Cash a farmer has in hand against the official producer price, time-discounted for what is still owed. A price paid in forty days is not the official price.
Held Stock
Where is cocoa accumulating?
Beans held by farmers, in purchasing clerk sheds and at depots — with the stated reason, which is what separates normal inventory from a seizing market.
Coverage
The panel launches in Ghana and extends to Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria. Roughly 400 respondents per wave across farmers, purchasing clerks, depot staff, input dealers and hauliers — the same respondents interviewed repeatedly, so the series measures change rather than sampling noise.
The market monitor already covers six producing origins and the shipping lanes into Europe, built entirely from public sources with every figure attributed.
Who uses it
- Commodity trading houses and physical originators
- Commodity funds and macro desks
- Chocolate manufacturers and procurement teams
- Trade-finance providers assessing counterparty and origin risk
- Operators preparing EUDR due-diligence statements
- Development institutions and researchers
What we will not claim
These measure current physical conditions. They are not forecasts, and any lead-lag relationship to arrivals or price is a hypothesis we publish the data to let you test. The panel is purposive rather than a representative sample, and nothing is seasonally adjusted until three years of history exist.