Saturday, April 07, 2012

What does your chocolate stand for?

Following on from my Easter post, our Fairtrade Easter Eggs came in time!!! yippee! Thankyou to those at the Heart of Chocolate that made it possible and yippee for APost that express post only took three days from post to arrival. For more information on Fairtrade chocolate click on the image below:



Eilleen's list of Fairtrade chocolate for Easter came from here.
Fairtrade NZ and Australia lists the Fairtrade Easter products here.
Remember, thankfully, new products are going Fairtrade even once a comprehensive list has been made. Your guide to products you can see is really the Fairtrade logo.
If that's on a product, then it meets the standard.

If you like Lindt and Ferrero (and they don't make it onto any of the lists), then sign the petition (and pass on the link via anyone you know) here to call them to act and make their chocolate, or at least part of their range, Fairtrade.

Because really, everytime we buy non Fairtrade chocolate, we are supporting child slave labour... I have made the decision to choose Fairtrade, or no chocolate at all. We have Fairtrade coffe and Fairtrade hot chocolate, and am changing over to Fairtrade products through my pantry as the current ones run out and as I find alternatives.

Happy Fairtrade Holidays!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't you have family candy stores that make their own chocolate locally? We have many many in our city & all over the US. I'm rather shocked that this is an issue. Another reason to buy local!

Kristy said...

Hi Anonymous
Thanks for taking the time to stop in.

I think your 'candy' is our 'chocolate'? We have 'candy' stores here (that make hard lollies etc). Buying locally made chocolate wouldn't help unless the ingredients were Fairtrade (from outside Aus) or locally grown/sourced.

I've done a quick search and found a few cocoa-growing places in Aus, but they are very new from what I have read, not enough to sustain ~all~ of Austalia's chocolate making. I would think the majority of cocoa beans are still imported from overseas (happy to be corrected)!

However, your post prompted me to search further (because as far as I knew no one grew cocoa beans and made choc here in Aus) and I found this one
http://www.daintreeestates.com/index.htm which uses Australian grown cocoa to make chocolate in Australia. That's the first one I've heard of and it's relatively new (launching late 2011 from what I could find). No Easter products that I could see but if anyone in Aus is buying their local products and using them to make Easter products, that would be a winner.

I'll be checking to see if there are any more about. Certainly none local to my state grow their own beans to make choc.

So unless a chocolate shop is using Fairtrade or locally grown ingredients, then I guess their chocolate wouldn't be Fairtrade/slave-free either. I've contacted the major 'chocolate making' stores here that I can think of, to ask them if they use Fairtrade cocoa beans/chocolate ingredients.

Do your US chocolate making (candy) shops source their ingredients locally grown? or Fairtrade from outside the US?

Anonymous said...

Daintree Estates chocolate is
the first commercially produced chocolate to be made from
cocoa beans grown in Australia.

Anonymous said...

Margaret River Chocolate Company, who do make chocolate in Western Australia (and are very popular), are not certified Fair Trade.

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