It was only a question of time before it would happen, but on Wednesday, the New York Times (and many other news outlets) announced that two teams of scientists had sequenced the complete DNA chain of the cocoa tree. Most appropriately, the news appeared in the business section, not the science section. The two rival teams, one financed by Mars, the other a collaboration between French government laboratories and the University of Pennsylvania backed by Hershey, were quick to dispel any worries that the DNA sequence would become private property. The information will be freely available. The Mars project can be found at the Cocoa Genome Project website.
Trading Visions Posts Q&A on Mars and Cadbury
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.
Mars Commits to Sustainability … Sort Of
I’ve taken a little time with this post to process some older information I had. But here it is:
Mars has committed to sourcing sustainable cocoa. According the company’s press release, Mars is “aiming to certify its entire cocoa supply as being produced in a sustainable manner, by 2020.” The firm plans to partner with the Rainforest Alliance (RA) which will provide the certification services. Well, at least for some of the cocoa. Here’s the press release again: “By 2020, the goal of the collaboration is to achieve Rainforest Alliance certification of 100,000 metric tonnes of cocoa annually for use in Mars products, a significant portion of Mars total cocoa requirements.” No word what significant means. Finally, the press release mentions that Mars will continue to work with UTZ Certified to achieve certification for cocoa produced in West Africa.
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.
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.
