The Chocolate Industry: The Business of candy bars

Chocolate. The Halloween treats that put smiles on young faces and quickly fill plastic pumpkin buckets: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, and Butterfingers.  How sweet it is!

Hershey, Nestle’s, and Mars, all household names, all Goliaths of the multinational chocolate companies, control the supply chain and the fate of family cocoa farms in West Africa and of children trafficked from one country to another and then sold to plantation owners. How bitter it is!

“After 20 years of broken corporate promises, there are still over 1 million child laborers in cocoa.”  (Green America, October 21, 2021)

Wanting to understand the cocoa supply chain and the price of a child trafficked and sold to a plantation owner? Watch The Dark Side of Chocolate.

Search youtube.

Looking for a “Fair Trade Certified cocoa business that pays farmer co-ops a premium for their cocoa”? Consider endangered species and EQUAL EXCHANGE, available at Whole Foods, Target, and Wal-Mart.

EQUAL EXCHANGE has mini-bars online at equalexchange.coop.

A choice for Halloween 2022?

Knowledge empowers. Be the voice for a silenced child. Money talks. Multinational chocolate companies listen when their profits shrink.

Candy bars are Big Business. Billions are spent in U.S. every Halloween.

                                                Imagine that.