Post by @conscious.app

The chocolate brand Hu Kitchen has to be one of the most disappointing sellouts we have ever seen. Hu Kitchen started in 2012 as a family restaurant and market in New York, built on no refined sugar, no emulsifiers, nothing ultra processed, under the slogan Get Back to Human, and the wrapper still reads, it's time to get back to the way humans ate before industry ruined food. Their chocolate took off because people wanted an ethical alternative to the big brands. By the end of 2018 Hu was in roughly 3,000 stores with a team of fifteen. In April 2019 Mondelēz, the company behind Oreo, Cadbury and Toblerone, bought a minority stake, and two years later it swallowed the remaining 93 percent for over 200 million dollars. A year later Channel 4 went undercover in Ghana and filmed children as young as 10 swinging machetes on farms supplying Mondelēz's brands. Since 2022 Mondelēz has funded Celleste Bio, an Israeli startup growing cocoa in steel tanks instead of on farms. In 2024 consumers also filed proposed class actions in U.S. federal court alleging that Mondelēz was using misleading ethical claims, because the supply chain still runs on child labor, deforestation, and farmers paid as little as 3 dollars a day. Mondelēz has bought at least nine companies since 2018, and in February its CEO said it keeps a running list of about 40 more it would like to own. The wrapper still carries the organic and fair trade seals. The restaurant that started all of it closed in 2020. Now every time you buy Hu Kitchen you are funding Mondelēz and the other ultra processed foods they own, which is why knowing who owns what you buy is so important. If you're like me and want to support the most ethical companies instead, you can use the Conscious Spend app to see who actually owns what you buy and how ethical any company is, so we can support the companies that actually deserve our money.