New Rankings Score Chocolate Companies on Environmental and Labor Issues
- Author: Emily Baron Cadloff
- Full Title: New Rankings Score Chocolate Companies on Environmental and Labor Issues
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #planet
- URL: https://modernfarmer.com/2023/04/chocolate-scorecard-2023/
Highlights
- The metrics are: traceability of products, if workers are paid a living income, if the supply chain contains child or forced labor, deforestation, agroforestry and agrichemical management (View Highlight)
- Cocoa, as an industry, has been rife with issues for decades. There are still roughly 1.5 million children in the cocoa industry in two countries alone, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Those same countries have lost more than 80% of their forest cover in the last sixty years, and cocoa production accounts for a third of that loss. (View Highlight)
- But with this scorecard, you can see exactly where a company or retailer ranks. The organizers and universities came up with a scoring methodology that ranks the companies in each category, and then they are given an overall score. A green egg means a company is ahead of industry standards. Yellow means it is developing good policies, and orange shows that it has made some starts but needs more work on implementing policies. A red egg means it is well behind industry standards. (View Highlight)
- One area that the scorecard doesn’t expand on at first glance is the relationship between certain companies. Tony’s Chocolonely, which scored second overall for its practices, processes its chocolate at Barry Callebaut facilities, which has an overall score of yellow. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream scored an overall yellow, but it is owned by Unilever, which declined to answer the survey as a whole. (View Highlight)
- The EU passed a law banning cocoa that is linked to deforestation; there is a similar act in debate in the UK. Across the US, states such as New York and California are debating bills, and a federal Senate bill was introduced in the last sitting. (View Highlight)