Making chocolate 100% slave free
This past Friday, students and Yale community members traversing Cross Campus were greeted by an enormous red, blue, and yellow truck full to bursting with an array of brightly packaged chocolate bars. It was a vehicle designed to transport chocolate all around the country, but it was also quite literally a vehicle to spread the Tony’s Chocolonely mission: “together we’ll make chocolate 100% slave free.”
“There is a very, very dark reality in the cocoa industry right now,” said Dena White, a spokesperson from Tony’s Chocolonely who is also known by her professional title “Hot Cocoa.”
The majority of the world’s cocoa comes from West Africa, with 60 percent coming from Ghana and the Ivory Coast. The cocoa is processed into chocolate by a handful of major companies and distributed to consumers, and it’s in the company’s interest to keep the cocoa market price low. Consequently, for a bar costing $4.99, only twelve cents go to the farmer, meaning that many people in the industry are living well below the poverty line.
The 2.5 million farms in Ghana and the Ivory Coast have 2.3 million children working on them, and 90 percent are working in illegal or highly dangerous conditions according to local law. In the worst instances, thirty thousand workers, a low estimate, are victims of human trafficking.
“Modern slavery in the cocoa industry is a direct result of extreme poverty,” said White.
Tony’s Chocolonely started as one man’s “lonely” journey to eradicate modern slavery in the cocoa industry. In 2002, a Dutch reporter named Teun van de Keuken started investigating whether the chocolate manufacturers who signed the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a protocol to end the worst forms of child labor in West Africa for goods that are imported to the States within a decade, were keeping their end of the agreement. When he discovered that no action had been taken, he bought and ate seventeen bars of chocolate and then asked the police to arrest him. He claimed to be “a chocolate criminal” because he had purchased chocolate that he had known had been made illegally. The case was dismissed, and van de Keuken began manufacturing his own “slave-free chocolate.”
The audience members at the event enjoyed some of this delicious chocolate flavored “dark milk pretzel toffee,” “milk honey almond nougat,” and more.
Today, Tony’s Chocolonely is the most popular chocolate brand in the Netherlands. They are an “impact business,” not a non-profit because they want to encourage other major confectionary corporations to follow in their footsteps and become fair trade: “How are they going to follow suit if you can’t prove it’s commercially viable?” asked White.
Their “five rules for 100% slave free chocolate” are: “traceable cocoa beans,” “a higher price,” “strong farmers,” “the long-term,” and “improved productivity and less dependency on cocoa.”
“We’re sharing it,” said White in reference to the Tony Chocolonely model. “We want the chains of inequality to finally be broken.”
In the audience was Shadrack Frimpong, a Ghanaian student at Yale’s School of Public Health and the founder of Cocoa360, a community run cocoa farm that supports a tuition-free girls school. Tony’s Chocolonely, he said, was “the only chocolate company that walks the talk.”
By the next day, both the bars and the truck were gone– the bars because they were enthusiastically devoured the night before, and the truck because it had recommenced its journey across the continental United States on a mission to unite sweet delights with human rights.
“And we’re just going to keep going and going and going and sharing this story,” said White.
Written by Claire Zalla, Yale College Class of 2021.