Derrick Teal  I  Editor-in-Chief

When my youngest was very little, he had trouble making the sounds necessary to enunciate certain words. One of them was “chocolate.” He would make an “f” sound instead of “ch.” And he would then truncate the last part of the word to “it,” instead of pronouncing the “l.” The result sounded a lot like, “f*** it.” Yes, the biggest of all English swear words. My wife took a video of our son asking for chocolate milk that became well known among family and friends. She asked him over and over, “What do you want?” And, becoming increasingly frustrated, he’d reply, “F*** it milk!” At one point, he even replaced “it” with “ing” which made his response of “F***ing milk!” even more hilarious. For a while, our friends and family replaced the king of swear words with “chocolate” after seeing my son lose his mind wanting f*** it milk.

Right now there are a lot of people losing their minds with chocolate makers for some of the ways in which they operate. The industry has increasingly been coming under scrutiny for its labor practices, involving both child labor and slavery for cocoa farming. The U.S. Bureau of International Labor Affairs says that there are approximately 1.56 million children involved in cocoa production in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, which produces about 60% of the world’s cocoa.

Climate change has drastically affected cocoa production. Usually predictable weather conditions have become anything but, which affects the yield of the very sensitive cocoa plants. The lack of supply has driven up the cost of cocoa, which has driven up the price of chocolate products. Additionally, chocolatiers are turning to something that I wrote about late last year, shrinkflation.

The thing is, consumers are becoming more and more sensitive to a company’s practices, and today’s levels of interconnectivity allow for a rapid transmission of information when something comes to light. You’d think something like slavery and child labor would be the driving force behind people searching for an alternative to chocolate produced using those practices, but most people are probably so detached from that reality that they can ignore it. Charging the same price, or more, for less product, well, that’s something people can’t seem to ignore, and it appears to be having more of an impact. I read an article not long ago called "8 Chocolate Brands to Avoid." I was hard pressed to name any other chocolate brand not on that list without having to resort to an internet search.

Thankfully for my own personal ethical integrity, I’m not big on chocolate. But if I were, I can imagine that I’d be as frustrated as my son that what I wanted wasn’t getting across to the people in charge. There are a lot of confectionary options out there, so I wouldn’t be surprised if people started saying “chocolate” about chocolate if the industry doesn’t find a way to change. FE

Cheers,
Derrick