About
Short Curriculum Vitae for Tony Lass
Tony graduated from the School of Agriculture of the University of Nottingham at Sutton Bonington in 1967 with a BSc Hons. in Agriculture, having undertaken a practical year on a fruit farm in Kent and spent most university vacations working on a Welsh hill farm.
He was then sponsored to do a Masters level qualification in Tropical Agriculture at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad to 1969.
In September 1967, he joined Cadbury Brothers (later called the British Cocoa and Chocolate Ltd, later Cadbury Schweppes plc, later still Cadbury plc which in 2010 become part of Kraft Foods and is now called Mondelez).
His brief on recruitment was to ‘improve the quality and increase the productivity of world cocoa production by all possible means’ – a role he maintained while being promoted into increasingly senior roles related to the cocoa supply chain of the company.
By 2000, he was Director of Global Cocoa Supplies for Cadbury plc – by then a buyer of some 250,000 tonnes of cocoa annually and he held responsibility for all cocoa technical issues and for global cocoa procurement with an annual spend at that time an estimated £500 million.
He was an employee of Cadbury for 36 years - to which should be added a further 10 years as a Consultant to them. During that time, he become a respected authority on all aspects of the agronomy and marketing of the cocoa crop He was the joint author of the 4th Edition of the standard textbook on the crop – entitled ‘Cocoa’ and published in 1985 by Blackwell Science.
Though now somewhat out of date and out of print, it was and still is the authoritative work on the crop and has been much acclaimed while selling in excess of 4,000 copies. Tony is now in the early stages of preparing the 5th Edition with supporting contributors. Many chapters need to be completely re-written due to advances in the intervening 30 odd years since the publication of the 4th Edition of this work.
His international reputation is demonstrated by the fact that during his career with Cadbury he was appointed Manager/Director of many complex international projects on cocoa issues (often Public Private Partnerships - as they would now be called). Amongst these could be listed:
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Industry Cocoa Quality Improvement Project in Cote d’Ivoire (a six year programme of work funded by the world’s major chocolate companies) to demonstrate that cocoa quality improvement was possible in the country
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International Witches’ Broom Project (a five year comparative epidemiology trial for disease control that ran in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Grenada, Trinidad and Venezuela), supported by 12 chocolate trade associations
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London Cocoa Trade Amazon Project (an eight year programme to collect endangered wild cocoa genotypes in the centre of origin of the crop in Ecuador and parts of Colombia), supported by the London cocoa market
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Member of the Management Board of the Cocoa Research Centre in Trinidad - the keeper of the largest collection of wild cocoa genotypes, for some 35 years (from 1971 to 2006)
Furthermore, he was permitted release by his employers on a number of occasions during his career to undertake short term cocoa consultancy Missions in a private capacity on behalf of international agencies including ADB, EU, IFC, UNDP and the World Bank. He successfully completed such Missions in Cameroon (twice), Cote d’Ivoire (twice), Equatorial Guinea, Ghana (thrice), Papua New Guinea, Sao Tome (twice).
