Friday, December 09, 2005

6 kilos of chocolate arrived!

Me and a lot of Tony's Chocolonely'sWe finally received our 30 bars of Tony's Chocolonely chocolate. This means we now have a chocolate stash of 6 kilos(!) It costed around 70 euros, including delivery, but the most important thing is that Ester can now eat chocolate again for a long time.

Why do we want to buy such a large amount of chocolate online? Well, Ester is not eating chocolate for I guess a year now, because she does not agree with the way it's produced. Cacao is produced in different places in the world, but almost all the cacao is mixed, before it is bought by the big chocolate producing companies. The problem with it is that you cannot easily omit cacao originating from a particular region.

That is what should happen with cacao from the Ivory Coast (Africa). A lot of cacao is harvested in criminal way. Some farms use children as slaves on a large scale. All chocolate products of large companies ad Mars and Nestle are for some percents made with cacao harvested by slaves. This was shown in the tv-program "Keuringsdienst van Waarde" and is being a item in almost all episodes of the program ever since.

The journalists of the program have talked with people from the chocolate industry, but couldn't convince them that they should demand cacao that wasn't produced in a criminal way. Since the chocolate was partly made by slaves. So one of the journalists, Teun van de Keuken, tried to take this to court. He was eating chocolate while knowing that at least a part of the candy was produced with slavery. That's against the law, so he wanted to be prosecuted. That didn't work; he wasn't found guilty. So after some attempts to raise public awareness for this issue, he started selling chocolate bars, made with cacao that was not produced in Ivory Coast and so should be safe.

The minimum amount of bars we could buy via the internet was 30. Initially we thought that was too much, but then we realized that we could give it away to people as a present. At the same time this way we could promote the Tony's Chocolonely chocolate bars.

You can see all tv episodes of "Keuringsdienst van Waarde" with an item about chocolate in it online. Or buy the chocolate bars yourself. You can also look for the few offline selling points.

So munch away!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

POWER TO THE CONSUMER...

Or is it?

POWER TO THE MEDIA!

Who do you believe?

Well, I certainly do not believe large companies easily, but I defenitely don't believe the media. How to verify the facts?

Anyway. I think it is a brave way to make a consumer choice, so congratulations on that. At least you feel like you are contributing to a better world and maybe you are.

Anonymous said...

Mmm, lekker was het in elk geval wel. Eindelijk is het verantwoord om chocola te eten. Goed idee!

Is het eigenlijk toegestaan in het Nederlands te reageren op een engelse blog-site?
Ik ben nogal eigenwijs dus probeer het even uit.
Maar ik zal wel zo open zijn om mijn naam onder dit anonieme bericht te zetten.
Sandra.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

a few corrections are in place.
I have eaten some chocolate over the past two years (time flies), but not even 10 procent from what I ate before I knew. So I still have to go to jail.

If I remember correctly at least 10 procent off cacao is produced by slaves.

The chocolate industry signed an agreement a couple of years ago that the first slave-free chocolate bar would be produced in 2005. They failed.

I don't know where the cacao from Tony's chocolonely came from, could well be from the Ivory Coast. Max Havelaar garanteed that it was slave -free, but they too were a bit vage about it. Next year Keuringsdienst van Waren will travel to Africa to see for themselves if their chocolate is okay.

To add to the confusion, I've talked to someone who works for a big chocolate factory and he said they (from the factory) haven't been able to find any slaves. I don't know how well they have searched for them. I know Keuringsdienst van Waren and others, had no problem finding slaves and get their statement so that Keuringsdienst van Waren has witnesses when they go to court with this case.

By the way, not every episode from Keuringsdienst van Waarde is about chocolate. They do a lot of interesting investigations. For example, they found out that fresh orange juice can be 2 years old.

Ester.