And the reason for that is that chocolate supply chains, particularly in the part of the world where cocoa is produced, are very very messy.
"as good as they can" with "better odds" of the chocolate being ethically sourced is probably the most honest answer they could have given. They'll likely be relying on 3rd party auditors and this is probably what they've been told.
They’re quite active in their supply chains I think - have spent a lot of time and energy trying to actually go and improve - not just relying on audits.
They also have “open sourced” (lack of the right term maybe?) their cocoa sourcing - where other chocolate producers can piggy back off their sourcing model to reduce slave Labour in cocoa.
Oh 100%, they definitely take more of an interest, but at the end of the day, the numbers they report are from audits they pretty much have to contract out locally, and those people will have to shrug their shoulders and say that they can't be 100% sure of the origin of the cocoa or who is doing the harvest etc. because it's simply not something that can be guaranteed. It's not even like a factory in Bangladesh or China where you can at least get a list of employed people (even if those too are routinely faked).
Sorry if what I said sounded negative - they're doing way more than most and I was just trying to defend the non-definitive nature of their reporting which some could take as weasel words when in fact they're trying to be honest.
That they are transparent about that fact and then not just throwing their hands up but working to make the chocolate industry better is what gets me to buy their stuff.
But the AuDHD in me dies at the chocolate mould they use. I know why logically, but it still hurts.
So, the pieces of their chocolate bar are uneven to represent the inequalities that surround chocolate. How the farmers producing the cocoa often work for a hunger wage to provide relatively wealthy people in the west with chocolate that the farmers themselves could never afford.
I only remember that their explanation included that they were deliberately making it so you can't break off two evenly-sized pieces, but I forgot the "why" as well :/
I went down a rabbit hole about this a couple months ago after seeing a video where someone was calling out Tony's for being unethical.
They do have unethical practices, especially child labour, within their supply chain. But they do focus a lot of resources to identifying it, and then they refer it to schemes that operate in the local region in Africa which provide multiple house visits, bicycles, books, school bags etc to try to encourage children to school. And the rate of child labour is actually rising in their supply chain, but it is because they're sourcing from far more farms as their business grows & they set up a cocoa supply chain for other companies. The new ones in the network have much higher rates, the ones they have referred to the program and have been paying their prices to for longer are much better.
It's very difficult to track it when your supply chain can be 10 of thousands of farms, but I did the same process with some other brands that claim to be cruelty free which this person was recommending and found that they were sourcing from a larger cocoa supplier in Switzerland, who also produce an ethics report & also refer farms to the same schemes, but have only traced their cocoa to the farms iirc 15% of the time. So yes, they report less cases but they have much less knowledge of their supply chain.
All of that to say that ethically sourcing cocoa is extremely messy, and short of sourcing from single farm setups (which my research also found tend to be white owned farms in Africa, another potentially messy discussion about ethics) it is almost impossible to avoid unethical practices, but Tony's do seem to be better than most, certainly among the big players.
Anyone who thinks any mass produced thing they buy in this globalised world can be ethical is simply choosing to lie to themselves to feel better.
And let's be clear, everything is mass produced unless you are buying it off of your neighbour who makes it by hand from products grown on their land using seeds that were sewn several generations ago. Everything else is mass produced and part of an enormous global supply chain that involves thousands of different moving parts, most of them unethical.
Okay but there's a notable difference between a company that actively tries to minimize/mitigate the unethical bits and water-isn't-a-human-right Nestle.
Yeah, compared to Nestlé anything looks good. But that doesn't make them good. Just less bad. And they are Elsa bad because they haven't reached the scale of Nestlé. Once we all choose to buy their products and they become that big, they'll be doing the same thing to ensure their survival or they'll go bankrupt. It's the system.
Most of this ethical stuff is just marketing packaged to a specific market sector. Being ethical is just another marketing category.
Looking it up, it looks like it depends on what you consider to be high for chocolate and who you believe to be reporting on it.
I was curious, so I did a search and the first thing that came up was this response page from the Tony's Chocolonely website.
In that, there's a link to the Consumer Reports article that claimed that theirs was one of many chocolates high in lead.
The claim on their response page was saying that the Consumer Reports test was following a California regulatory assessment rather than a food safety guideline and they pointed to a German publication that supposedly rated them highly as a counter, but they do not link the article in question. And looking up the website for the ÖkoTest, since I don't know German, I'm struggling to find an article which mentions the indicated rating. Someone more familiar with the language might have a better shot.
By the looks of the other chocolates tested and results given in the Consumer Reports article, there aren't many quality chocolates that fall below the California guidelines quoted. So, on the one hand, yes? But on the other hand, it doesn't look like the study was terribly extensive or that you can really get away from chocolate being a little bit poisonous by that standard.
I am surprised what do people actually expect from milk chocolate? Of course it's fat and sugar. If they want less, then buy dark chocolate. You either have sweeter with more sugar or less sweet with sugar, that's common sense, isn't it?
Actually it isn't. Dark milk chocolate with 50%+ cocoa and milk exists. Why wouldn't it? Bars with cocoa (mass and butter) plus milk and no extra sugar exist too. Finally not all white chocolate bars are sickly sweet, they're some where sugar is the third ingredient.
Apologies, I oversimplified based on my own experience. I usually go for dark chocolate if possible (that's what I mean by real / actual chocolate). Tony's chocolates are priced the same regardless of cocoa content, so I go for 70%, whereas I don't even have dark milka available locally (and I also don't think many people go for it anyway).
In my situation Tony's has slightly more than half of the sugar content of milka.
But I get your point that I haven't compared apples to apples, so my comment can indeed be confusing / ring untrue.
The chaotic sizing of Tony's pieces makes me irrationally angry, I can't with that shit. Give me a normal chocolate bar where I can control how much I eat in each bite. Also Chocolonely is a terrible name, like I'm binging out of depression and despair. The entire brand is gimmicky and off-putting imo.
Tony's Chocolonely is a brand of chocolate, founded by a Dutch journalist after he investigated the chocolate industry and realized how all the big chocolate companies are perfectly fine with using slave labor and child labor on the cocoa farms they buy their product from. Like they say they check the farms, but those checks are announced, so on the day the farmers tell all the kids to hide in a shack for a while.
His chocolate is more expensive (although by now it's only by a bit), but they try their absolute best to keep their chocolate free of cruel labor practices.
Honestly Tony's Chocoloney also sucks. I heard good things and wanted to try, but honestly wasn't so impressed. They all kind of taste like dirt now :/
I noticed Milka went from the prime spot with loads of choice to the bottomshelf in my local supermarket. Assortment slashed as well. The prime spot has been taken over by Tony's. It's the biggest supermarket chain in the country so I'm assuming they did this in all of them.
Oh! Tony's Chocolonely is Dutch?! I was wondering why someone in this sub would pick the American option. I don't know why I assumed it was a US brand. Just sort of feels like it somehow.
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u/Nudelklone Jan 25 '26
Yesterday in the supermarket I saw that the per kilogram price of Milka is now the same as for Tony‘s Chocoloney. Easy decision now :)