Death by Chocolate

By Crystal Landes

You’ve been at work for 12 hours now. They’ve just shot that scene, again. You’re tired and you’re hungry. So you head to the craftee table. You see fruits and veggies, but what you really want is something sugary. Chocolate!

Chocolate is an exotic treat, that we, as Westerners have the privilege of indulging in and indulge we do by consuming 3 ½ billion tons every year. That’s a lot of chocolate, which means we have a huge responsibility to use our spending power and change the way the business is run. There are three main issues that come with every Snickers, Twix or bag of M&M’s you eat. First the packaging is not made out of recyclable materials, secondly the cocoa is not fair trade and third it’s not shade grown.

400 million M&M’s are made daily. None of the wrappers for any sweets made by the Mars Inc. company, including M&M’s, Snickers, Mars Bars, Skittles, Milky Way or Twix are made out of recyclable material, except for M&M’s Minis, which come in a little plastic tube. If 400 million M&M’s are made daily then we can assume that roughly the same number is made of the other Mars sweets. That comes to approximately 8 billion non-recyclable wrappers on a daily basis! How many of these sweet confections do you see on your craft services table or in your office snack hub?

By now we’ve all heard the term fair trade and shade grown, but why is it so important? Fair trade ensures that the farmers get just that, a fair market value for their product. For every US dollar spent on chocolate, huge companies who deal in non-fair trade get 70 cents, while the farmer only gets 5cents. Shade grown again means what it sounds like, that the cocoa is grown in the shade. This is important because cocoa is happiest growing in the shade provided by other trees canopy, but more importantly because non-shade grown cocoa is contributing to the massive amounts of deforestation that takes place every day. This was made possible in the 1970’s during the “Green Revolution” when they genetically modified cocoa plants to make them able to grown in full sun.
Now I have to admit here, I feel Mars, Inc. is in a similar position as McDonald’s was when Supersize Me came out. While other peer companies are acting in similar ways these two companies seem to get the brunt of the blame. So let’s get this straight, alongside Mars, Inc., these large companies are not using fair trade cocoa: Hershey, Nestle, Russell Stover or Dove. Hershey’s and M&M’s/Mars control 2/3’s of $13 billion US chocolate market.
Because America is the world’s largest chocolate consumer (in 2002 we spent $13.1 billion on the 3.4 billion pounds we consumed) we are in a position to change the way the chocolate industry is run. How? First of all, every dollar you spend is like a vote. You are CHOOSING to buy a product and thus supporting the company, and their values, that make it. We can choose to buy organic, shade-grown, fair trade chocolate. Some national companies who use fair trade, shade grown, organic cocoa are Dagoba, Endangered Species Organic Chocolate, Green & Black’s and many more. But even better are the local artisan chocolate shops such as Jacques Torres Chocolate located in Brooklyn and Manhattan and Travel Chocolate, which is sold at Grand Café and Village Farm and Grocery, both located in Manhattan. Secondly, we can look for wrappers that are made from recycled materials. In addition, we can urge the large companies to use recyclable packaging by calling their toll free numbers, some of which are listed below. Over 70% of the worlds chocolate comes from Africa. While that may seem like worlds away, we can start to make a difference here in the US by making changes in our daily spending habits, personally for ourselves and professionally in our offices.

Hershey 800-468-1714
M&M/Mars Inc. 800-627-7852
Nestle 800-851-0512
Russell Stover 800-777-4028
Dove 800-551-0704