this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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Mildly Interesting
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Some info, that's interesting and helps balance this blatant advertisement. Tony's was started by Dutch television maker Teun van der Keuken. He worked on a program that exposes products for their production methods and false marketing and so on. They stumbled onto the slavery that's part of the cacao industry. He asked to be arrested for eating chocolate, and in doing so enabling slave labor, but he wasn't. He started out Tony's Chocolonely to attempt to change the chocolate industry. He's not part of the company anymore. He has concluded the mission has failed, and is very critical of his former company, saying they've lost sight of the aim: slave-free chocolate.
Wait, failed how? I didn’t know about this part.
This article is from 2015. By then it's been 10 years since the company started, and he already left it. In the article he explains that still only 25% of the cacao used in Tony's Chocolonely is guaranteed slave-free, let alone that they've had any significant impact on the industry at large. He says the situation of slave labor in cacao industry has only worsened. Tony's has changed the message on their product "100% slave free" (which was false advertising) to something like "working together towards slave-free chocolate", which he concludes to be meaningless marketing. It's rather bizarre that such a message is allowed on a product that contains cacao from slave-labor....
Wow, that sucks. Thanks for sharing it. I’m going to try to look up what the current status is.