Post by @conscious.app

Waking up is realizing Tony’s Chocolonely might not be the ethical darling it’s made out to be. Barry Callebaut is the largest cocoa processor on earth. It makes chocolate for Nestlé, Hershey and Mondelēz, and since 2013, for Tony’s Chocolonely. Tony’s started as a protest against the companies profiting from child labour in cocoa, and as it scaled it started sharing their supply chain. They picked Barry Callebaut on purpose, to prove you can track every bean back to its farm without leaving the mainstream industry. Barry Callebaut’s own report found 25,288 cases of child labour last year, up from 19,389. It says wider monitoring finds more, which is fair, but its target was to fix every case by 2025 and 51,420 are still in that process. In 2021 the campaign group Slave Free Chocolate dropped Tony’s from its ethical brands list purely over that relationship. And in 2023 Tony’s stopped being founder-owned, when Verlinvest, the investment firm behind AB InBev, took majority control. Tony’s does earn part of its reputation. They keep their beans separate, show up at farms unannounced, and publish every child labour case they find. The Chocolate Scorecard rated them green in 2026. So we rate Tony’s a C, while companies like Nestlé sit at an F. That’s not a reason to stop buying them. But more than five chocolate brands score higher with us. Taza publishes what it paid every single farm it buys from. Beyond Good makes its chocolate in Madagascar, so the farmers are down the road from the factory. Tony’s does neither, and answers to an investment firm. If you want to shop from the most ethical companies, use the Conscious App, where we publish ethics rankings so you know who you’re funding.