Tony Chocolonely
Saturday, December 3rd, 2005
This extremely stylish wrapper is for a new chocolate bar. A 100% slave-free chocolate bar. I bought one yesterday and it tastes pretty good.
The idea for this bar came when a Dutch television program “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” (a play on words, translate roughly as the Inspectorate for Values). They did some research on how chocolate is made. They found out a big part of the cacao beans production involves slavery and child labour. They discussed this with some chocolate manufacturers, but these seemed unwilling to change their ways and produce slave free chocolate.
In the end they took matters in their own hands and created their own bar of chocolate; Tony Chocolonely (Audio alert, nice tune though!). Unfortunately, these bars are only available in the Netherlands. I hope that they will start exporting these bars to other countries. Or even better, that the chocolate-makers come to their senses and start producing more of these kinds of bars.
Side-note: one of the journalists of the “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” program even tried to get himself arrested for eating chocolate. Because slavery is a crime, and buying something while knowing that a crime was committed in the process of obtaining this good is illegal (fencing).
He tried to turn himself over to the police, but they rejected him. He tried some other things (even tried dragging himself to court), but so far he has not been able to get punished for his crime.
