The Dark Side of Chocolate

Happy Valentines Day!

Let’s celebrate love by caring about where we get our gifts.

As we have pointed out before, one of the most difficult food issues to come to terms with is our love affair with chocolate. If Halloween is a general candy holiday, Valentines Day is a specifically chocolate holiday. This forces us again to confront how chocolate is produced.

Chocolate puts the Big in Big Business, with a market estimated to be worth about $45 billion, and growing. Big chocolate manufacturers include household names like Nestle, Mars and Hershey, who purchase chocolate from the West African Ivory Coast through the global cocoa market. In 2005, these companies and others pledged to stop buying chocolate from farms that use enslaved or child labor.

But still today more than 2 million children are working in the cocoa production, and corporations are not being held to account for their part in the process. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2021 held that corporations are not liable for child labor that occurs outside of U.S. borders. Even worse, growing demand for chocolate is contributing to deforestation, even in protected wildlife areas. Elephants and chimpanzee populations in the Ivory Coast are at increasing risk of extinction as their numbers decline.

We need more than "greenwashing" by chocolate companies. The only way to achieve this is by creating consumer pressure on brands to be accountable to their customers. Luckily, consumers do have choices. By picking a chocolate brand with Fair Trade or Slave Free Chocolate certifications, buyers can show there is a market for chocolate that does not harm children or the planet.

If you want to show your true love how you feel with chocolates, try consulting the Fair Trade America list of businesses that have accountable supply chains for their ingredients. Only by voting with our dollars can we change the way chocolate companies do business.