Cadburys Dairy Milk Chocolate Bars (Fair Trade)
After promising to source fairtrade beans for its flagship Dairy Milk bar, Cadbury made good. On July 21, the first Fairtrade Dairy Milk bars started coming off the production line in Bourneville. Within days, these bars will appear in shops all over the UK and Ireland. It’s the first time that a mainstream chocolate brand has switched to fairtrade.
I have mentioned before that the Westernization of the tastes of the Indian middle classes is part of the great hope of the chocolate industry. Much of the sustainability talk that is making the rounds these days is driven by the desire to produce enough cocoa at reasonable prices to capture that market. But a recent report makes me wonder how much there will be to capture.
Why did Mars and Cadbury recently decided to seek third-party verification for some or all of their chocolate products? Trading Visions, a UK web site devoted to increasing information and education about fairtrade, wanted to find out. They contacted both Mars and Cadbury and number organizations to provide their answers to this and other questions. I was invited to contribute my own thoughts as well.
You can find the all questions and answers on their web site.
Here’s a Reuters report on Kuapa Kokoo and the impact of the recent announcement by Cadbury to source fairtrade beans for its Dairy Milk Bar.
Cadbury, the British chocolate maker, has announced that it will pursue fairtrade certification for Dairy Milk, its best-selling chocolate bar. Cadbury and the Fairtrade Foundation, the British arm of the the global fairtrade movement announced yesterday that the certification will be achieved by the Summer of 2009.
