Tony’s Chocolonely bars may look fun, but they’re serious about changing the world too. On the outside it’s all about the packaging’s bold fonts and bright colours, but open it up and you find delicious chocolate made slave-free. Tony’s new campaign, “A Sweet Solution to a Bitter Truth”, aims to completely end slavery in chocolate production and make the businesses involved accountable for their supply chain – including the human rights of those involved.
Despite being supposedly eradicated more than 20 years ago, illegal child labour is still widely prevalent across the supply chain in the chocolate industry. With the large corporations behind the chocolates we know and enjoy having no responsibility for human rights violations in their supply process, the continual driving down of raw ingredient prices leaves farmers in West Africa no choice but to use illegal labour to survive.
To raise awareness of Tony’s campaign they’ve launched a Sweet Solution range of four bars, giving their take on confectionary giants Toblerone (Mondelez), KitKat (Nestle), Twix (Mars) and Ferrero Rocher (Ferrero). While not designed to completely replicate, these sweet staples show that delicious chocolate, including these huge brands, can be made fairly. The KitKat and Twix bars were largely similar to each other inside, taking a spin on their inspirations and including biscuit pieces rather than wafer or biscuit all the way through. The nougart-y Toblerone-inspired bar, and the supposedly Ferrero Rocher-themed nutty circles were my favourites with the nutty crunch working beautifully with Tony’s milk chocolate.
It’s more than just raising awareness though, there’s real action too with the inside of each wrapper repeating the campaign messages and offering a QR code to scan and sign a petition directly. The petition, to demand that companies are held legally responsible for protecting the human rights of their supply chains, launched alongside the products and has already been signed more than 60,000 times (at the time of writing). I’m a big fan of the kit of downloadable graphics and GIFs to help campaigners further spread the word themselves and extend Tony’s reach with this activity.
The packaging design really does make you double take, with something as simple as taking key colours from the designs of Twix, KitKat and Toblerone (it took me longer to work out the Ferrro Rocher one) to instantly know what you’re getting without explicitly mentioning the bars they’re paying homage to.
As if you needed more reason to support this campaign, the profits from the sale of the Sweet Solution bars in this campaign are going to 100Weeks: an organisation that provides cash support and financial training to women in extreme poverty across Rwanda, Ghana, Uganda and Ivory Coast.
