Chocolate Stuff
You Should Know

The California Prop 65 legislation set more stringent recommendations for daily intake limits for various metals and other chemicals, including lead and cadmium, and now require warning labels on products exceeding the limits (and sold in-state). The 2019 European Union legislation (Regulation EC) has slightly higher maximum concentrations for the contaminants, but rather than enforcing a labelling requirement, the EU law prohibits sale of any products which exceed the limits.

This means products determined to be toxic if consumed regularly will still be on our store shelves, and labelled with a warning message in the state of California.

We don't know of any legislation on the horizon that will actually take products high in lead and cadmium off the shelves, or even require warning labels in states other than California. This means we have to use reputable non-affiliated sites, like As You Sow, to compare the lab results for different products.

To make sure your all your favorite chocolate brands are safe for everyday consumption, check out this archive of 467 chocolate products with filters for lead and cadmium concentration per serving.

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Help us to get our lab results published on As You Sow, so more consumers can find us when they’re searching for safer chocolate brands.

Donating to As You Sow helps to get more products tested, and puts pressure on lawmakers to pass meaningful legislation addressing these issues!

Messed up From the Beginning

For as long as chocolate has been delicious and foreign working wages have been regulation-free, children and cacao farmers in western Africa have been denied human rights. 

Only a handful of chocolate trading and processing companies control the majority of global and local cacao markets. This bureaucratic separation between farmer and the consumer makes accountability for the wage and treatment of farmers essentially nonexistent. 

We Really (have to look like we) Care!

In the mid-90s, shocking reports of child labor and disturbing cycles of poverty in cacao-producing countries surfaced in the western media.  Since the leak, under the incessant pressure of activist groups and general public outcry, international cacao conferences were held to discuss and plan for a sustainable global cacao economy.

The first global "plan" was drawn up in 2001, when the Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed by the world's leading chocolate manufacturers to eradicate child slavery from cocoa farming. Thirteen years later, only five percent of the global chocolate production can be certified slave-free.

The Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed by the world's leading chocolate manufacturers to eradicate child slavery from cocoa farming. Thirteen years later, only five percent of the global chocolate production can be certified slave-free.

Drawing up and signing this voluntary agreement essentially shifted full responsibility to the chocolate companies to police their own cocoa supply chain without any plan for legislation or oversight from federal regulators.

But Big Chocolate Makes Big Money!

Another plan was drawn up in 2009, the Global Cocoa Agenda, but records from these meetings imply a disturbing imbalance of representation, in favor of cacao stakeholders already benefitting enormously from the current system.

Meanwhile, in the last 20 years, farmers haven't benefited from any general increase in grower share of the market, despite the multi-decade boom in chocolate sales around the world.

What about Fair Trade?

Fairtrade premiums are supposed to strengthen the farmer-owned share of the market. In an unsettling report in 2012 by journalists partnered with PAIR (Programme for African Investigative Reporting), farmer cooperatives only took in half as much as the Fairtrade brand itself made in licensing fees to display the logo.

Farmer cooperatives only took in half as much as the Fairtrade brand itself made in licensing fees to display the logo.

After decades of inaction from the governments of the leading consumers of chocolate (Western Europe and North America), it’s clear that the corporate mammoth of big chocolate will continue business as usual, spending more revenue on elaborate marketing campaigns and lots of photo-ops with smiling cacao farmers, than on a pricier raw product that delivers ethical assurance.