Biggest Cocoa Importers!

Ending the year on a chocolate high with the last MakeoverMonday challenge. The data is from a CBI article that explores the demand for cocoa in the European market. Europe is the leading market for cocoa beans due to very high consumption as well as its processing industry. While Europe's imports (in thousand tonnes) are still more than 2.5 times the nearest competitor, demand in Asia and Oceania has increased more than 1.5 times.

The graph provides a quick clear view of the huge demand in Europe, and the increasing demand from Asia and Oceania that has overtaken the Americas.

The simple dataset depicts the cocoa import trends of the largest cocoa importers over the last five years. I wanted to create a simple slope graph to visualize the change in trends for each region. While I located some tutorials for two-step slope graphs, elegant multi-period slope charts do not appear to be very easy to make in Tableau. Instead I have resorted to one of Mike Bostock's legendary adaptations of Edward Tufte's slope graph, with some small modifications. Tufte's minimalistic slope graph technique emphasizes on showing the change gradient through simple lines. The text labels positioned on the lines minimize the reader's eye movement and enable reading of the exact values.

The Observable notebook is here.