The true cost of a chocolate bar..

Today social enterprise and research institution True Price publishes a report where they discuss the true costs of chocolate. ‘The true cost’, we hear you think? Yes.. please take a seat. Not the clear cut price. Not the price you pay at the supermarket. But someone else is paying the real price. The cocoa farmer and his family, to be precise..

Research institution True Price is on it: calculating the true costs of a chocolate bar. True Price takes the market price of a product, chocolate in this case, and adds this up to the negative social and environmental effects. This is what they call the ‘true costs’. The bill for the true costs, which includes poverty, child labor, modern slavery and deforestation are not paid by the industry. Instead society and in particular the families in cocoa villages in West-Africa, pay the price. Tony’s goal: to limit the potential true costs as much as possible, for ourselves and the entire chocolate industry.

True Price’s report is super important to us, because making the negative effects in the industry transparent is one step in the right direction towards change. The research has been carried out before in 2013. This new research gives us the opportunity to trace the development of our own ‘true costs’, in comparison to the rest of the industry.

And what are the most important conclusions? Well.. the true costs in the total cocoa industry haven’t changed, unfortunately. Relatively the true costs have decreased by 28%, compared to the previous research done in 2013. This seems like good news, however this improvement is mainly because of the increased production of cocoa and as a result the negatives effects per kilo have decreased. Get it?

The true costs of a Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate bar have decreased both absolute and relatively and are 55% lower than the industry average. With this we improve our lead in the industry in comparison to 2013, when we scored 45% better than the industry. Cause for celebration? Nope, we are far from satisfied.

Adults and children who do not get paid for the work they do, happens in the environment of extreme poverty and in the cocoa chain where profit maximization is most important. As long as a farmer is not able to make a living income nothing will change. That’s why we motivate chocolate companies to work together with the farmers cooperatives based on an equal relationship and to pay a price for cocoa that will dramatically reduce the true costs of a chocolate bar. And at Tony’s, we will continue to reduce our true costs more and more.

What can you do? Make a conscious choice when deciding what chocolate you eat and help us spread our story. Share this post with your neighbor, other chocolate companies or politicians. Because together we make 100% slave free chocolate the norm in chocolate.

Would you like more information or are you a sucker for numbers and graphs, then this one is for you: the complete research.