Tag: Hershey

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ILRF Begins a New Chocolate Campaign

The International Labor Rights Fund began a new letter writing campaign to protest the use of child labor in the cocoa sector. The letters ask the CEOs of Hershey, Mars and Nestlé about their concrete efforts to limit the use of child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa. The campaign aims to end the aura of secrecy and the lack of accountability surrounding the manner in which the Harkin-Engel Protocol has been implemented. Go to the website and send a letter yourself.

And just in time for Valentine’s Day, the ILRF produced a new scorecard to help you understand your choices when it comes to buying chocolate. The scorecard rates companies as either bitter, semi-sweet and sweet depending on their record regarding labor issues. There are few surprises. As I pointed out, buying fair-trade chocolate is the surest way to ensure that child labor was not used during the production of cocoa. But the semi-sweet group shows that it is possible for conventional companies to do some things right.

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Shrinking Foods

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here that Hershey’s price increases might be accompanied by another strategy to pass higher prices on to consumers–decreasing the weight of the product. And, lo and behold, here’s the confirmation. Yesterday, the International Herald Tribune published an article highlighting the shrinking food weights for a number of manufacturers. Skippy Peanut butter jars will contain 16.3oz rather than 18oz and forget the half gallon cartons of orange juice, they’ll contain only 89 rather than 96 fl. oz. As for chocolate, Mars will decrease the volume in some of its candies and others will probably follow.

But then we have already seen the incredibly shrinking package in the chocolate market for some time. When I grew up in Germany, a chocolate bar contained 100 grams of chocolate. For me, that’s a normal size. With the emergence of all the fancy gourmet chocolates over the past decade, however, bar sizes have decreased even before the recent price increases. I guess one way to state the exclusivity of a chocolate bar is to make it small. I wonder what it is in our subconscious that associates small with exclusive rather than rip-off.

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Hershey Net Profit Down 65%

These are bad days for Hershey. As Bloomberg reports, the company’s fourth quarter was dreadful. It lost market share to Mars and faces higher cocoa and milk prices. The forecast for 2008 is not promising either.I’ve always wondered about the appeal of the Hershey bar. Growing up in Germany, I did not know about the Hershey bar until I read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. That created an almost mythical idea in my mind. Imagine my disappointment when I first tasted one. It was such a let down. Compared to Milka, Sarotti, Ritter Sport, the Hershey bar tasted gritty and waxy. Not enough conching, not enough cocoa and cocoa butter.

When the dark chocolate craze hit in 2000, Hershey tried to reposition itself and create fancy chocolate bars with made from single origin cocoa beans – Hershey’s Cacao Reserve. The packaging and the wording are fancy but the chocolate does not taste any better. The 35% milk tastes sticky and sour while the 65% has no subtlety at all. As U.S. chocolate tastes mature, Hershey seems behind the time. One can barely imagine how bad it will taste once they are permitted to substitute vegetable fat for cocoa butter.No wonder, then, that the company performs poorly.