How responsible is the chocolate industry?
World Chocolate Day on 7 July marks the date when chocolate was first brought to Europe in 1550, highlighting its historical and cultural significance. Since then, chocolate has evolved from the bitter drink introduced by Spanish explorers to a staple sweet treat in British cuisine and culture.
However, it’s not all sweetness and light in the world of chocolate right now. The industry is experiencing record prices for cocoa caused by adverse growing conditions and at the same time is facing calls for greater transparency in a supply chain impacted by gender inequality and child labour.
The allmanhall team explore the origins of chocolate and how it is made and investigate what the industry is doing to face their current challenges.
Where does chocolate come from?
The history of chocolate can be traced back to Mexico, where the first cacao plants were found by the Olmecs, one of the earliest civilisations in Latin America. They drank an ancient chocolate drink during rituals and used it as medicine. Centuries later, the Mayans created a brew from roasted and ground cacao seeds and called it xocolatl meaning bitter water. Both the Mayans, and later the Aztecs, continued to use it in their most sacred rituals of birth, marriage and death.
Legend has it that, after the Aztec king Montezuma welcomed the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés with the chocolate drink, Cortés took it back to Spain in 1528, where it soon grew in popularity once it was sweetened.
By the 17th century, chocolate had become a fashionable drink throughout Europe. However, it remained largely a privilege of the rich because it was made by hand, a slow and laborious process.
In 1828, the invention of the chocolate press revolutionized chocolate making. This innovative device could squeeze cocoa butter from roasted cacao beans, leaving a fine cocoa powder behind. The powder was then mixed with liquids and poured into a mould, where it solidified into an edible bar of chocolate.
Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter is generally credited for adding dried milk powder to chocolate to create milk chocolate in 1876. But it wasn’t until several years later, when he worked with his friend Henri Nestlé, that they created the Nestlé Company and brought milk chocolate to the mass market.
In the twenty-first century, the UK chocolate and confectionery market is worth around £5.47 billion. The sales volume of chocolate in the UK was about 115,643 tons in 2023. The market is dominated by a few large players, with the five largest manufacturers (Lindt & Sprüngli, Ferrero International, Mars Incorporated, Mondelēz International, and Nestlé SA) accounting for 70% of total retail sales.
How is chocolate made?
Chocolate is made from cocoa beans from the tree Theobroma cacao, an indigenous tree to South America. Most of the world’s cacao trees are grown within 20 degrees north and south of the equator. The primary growing regions are South America, Southeast Asia and West Africa.
Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana are the world’s two largest cocoa exporters, producing 2.38 million metric tonnes per annum, with more than half of exports headed for Europe ready to be transformed into liquid cocoa, cocoa butter or cocoa powder. 5.5 million people work harvesting cocoa beans to meet global demand.
The process of transforming cacao beans into chocolate is complex. Cacao seeds are harvested and fermented to enhance their flavour. Following fermentation, the beans are dried, cleaned, and roasted. The cacao bean’s shell is removed, resulting in cacao nibs. These nibs are subsequently ground to create cacao mass. In this grinding process, cocoa butter is released from the nibs, creating a smooth chocolate liquor.
Chocolatiers incorporate additional ingredients like sugar, milk powder, or vanilla to enhance the flavour and texture of their chocolate creations. Additional cocoa butter may occasionally be included to provide an enhanced creamy texture to the chocolate.
How responsible is chocolate production?
The environmental effects of the cocoa industry emerge across the value chain, from the extraction of raw materials and production of farming inputs through to the industrial processing of beans into cocoa powder or cocoa butter.
Cocoa farmers usually clear tropical forests to plant new cocoa trees rather than reusing the same land. That practice has spurred massive deforestation in West Africa, particularly in Cote D’Ivoire. Experts estimate that 70% of the country’s illegal deforestation is related to cocoa farming.
There are other direct effects, like water pollution or loss of biodiversity from the application of artificial pesticides, or less visible consequences, like greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil fuels used to transport the beans to the processing factory.
In terms of the environmental impacts of chocolate produced and consumed in the UK, research by the University of Manchester concluded that the global warming potential (GWP) of chocolate ranges from 2.9–4.2 kg CO2 eq./kg. Around 10,000 litres of water is needed to produce a kilogram of chocolate, while land-use change associated with cocoa production increases total GWP by 3–4 times, which displays the substantial impact.
Notably, chocolate made with cow’s milk has a substantially higher environmental impact than when made with any plant based milk, across all metrics. It results in around three times as many greenhouse gas emissions, uses around 10 times as much land, between two and 20 times as much water and results in much larger amounts of eutrophication (the excessive enrichment of a water body with nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). Although the impacts of almond, oat, soy and rice milk vary, they all have a lower emissions footprint, meaning vegan chocolate is a great option for environmentally conscious consumers, with many reporting no discernible differences in taste.
Furthermore, packaging is a key environmental issue that is often overlooked, despite its pertinence. Plastic packaging continues to be relied upon by many brands, including Mondelez, Nestlé, and Mars. Also, although many larger brands have ‘no-deforestation’ policies, they generally lack any reference to paper packaging, and there are long-standing problems with excessive and unnecessary packaging, particularly with products associated with events such as Valentine’s Day and Easter. Indeed, the UK is renowned for its relatively poor levels of recycling compared to other European countries, with paper recycling and chocolate packaging playing a significant role.
Alongside the environmental impacts, issues of poverty and gender inequality are prevalent within the industry, which relies on many smallholder farmers in West Africa.
Women play a critical role in cacao farming, undertaking 70% of the work but receiving only 20% of the income. Cacao producers live below the extreme poverty line – the average cacao farming family member is estimated to survive off 74p a day in Cote D’Ivoire, but for women that figure is just 23p a day.
Patriarchal attitudes often exclude them from decision making, land ownership, and the all-important stage of selling the crop. Legally landless and therefore not considered ‘farmers’, women’s ability to join co-operatives, receive training, access finance, and improve their lives, is limited.
Child labour is also widespread. An estimated 1.56 million children in Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana work on family cocoa farms, often using dangerous machetes and knives to cut the bean pods, carrying full sacks of pods which weigh more than 100 pounds, working long hours and not attending school. Around 30% of children labouring on cocoa farms in Cote D’Ivoire do not attend school, which violates the ILO’s Child Labour Standard.
Recently, many of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturers have admitted to the existence of child labour within their supply chains, but this is only because they have been pressured to by consumers.
What are chocolate companies doing to address their challenges?
Tony’s Chocolonely is one of very few chocolate manufacturers to be completely transparent about their supply chain. Tony’s mission is to make 100% slave-free chocolate the norm, linking social and environmental outcomes by increasing awareness among farmers and consumers and investing in long-term partnerships with farmers to improve farming techniques.
Tony’s aren’t, however, the only option for ethically-sourced chocolate – choosing a Fairtrade certified manufacturer should give you peace of mind because they work with farming co- operatives, businesses and governments to make trade fairer.
Nestlé have been using 100% certified sustainable cocoa in the UK & Ireland since 2015, although they moved from Fairtrade to Rainforest Alliance certification in 2020. Nestlé wanted to ensure that farmers receive a fair price for their cocoa, and that they were tackling key social and environmental issues including child labour and deforestation – aims that they felt were best matched by the mission and goals of Rainforest Alliance. However, according to Food Empowerment Project, Nestlé’s Cocoa Plan only works with 5% of cocoa farmers in Cote D’Ivoire.
Mondelez International launched Cocoa Life in 2012 to help make cocoa sourcing more sustainable in key cocoa-producing countries. They are working with NGOs to help enhance child protection systems, introduce women’s empowerment action plans, address deforestation, and build climate change resilience.
Ferrero, who source around 80% of their palm oil from Malaysia, is another example of a major chocolate producer whose products have been renowned for their poor environmental performance. However, they now engage with sustainability issues to help combat reputational damage, and have signed up to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
WWF works with the world’s biggest chocolate companies to improve cocoa production. One, Barry Callebaut, processes 22% of chocolate globally. Launched in 2016, the company’s Forever Chocolate sustainability programme introduced a number of sustainability goals for 2025 which were recently reworked to set new measurable targets for 2030 and beyond. The focus is now on four goals: lifting 500,000 producers out of poverty; achieving zero child labour; become forest positive in 2025 and net zero by 2050; 100% certified or verified cocoa and ingredients in all products, traceable to farm level.
Between a quarter and a third of all cocoa is grown under a certification label, such as Fair Trade and the Rainforest Alliance/UTZ Certification. However, according to Food Empowerment Project, no single label can guarantee that the chocolate was made without the use of exploitive labour.
Global cocoa prices impacted by climate change
Global cocoa prices are currently experiencing a volatile period, influenced by a combination of factors including weather patterns, disease outbreaks, and global supply issues. While prices have recently fallen from record highs, they remain elevated compared to historical levels.
Global cocoa production has been severely affected in recent years by adverse growing conditions linked to a prolonged El Niño phenomenon and an outbreak of Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus Disease last year.
This has been exacerbated by global heating. Over the last decade, global heating has added an extra three weeks of temperatures exceeding 32C in Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana during the main growing season between October and March.
Ghana, the second-largest cocoa producer, has experienced a 46% drop in harvest production over the past three years. Meanwhile, Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest producer, faces a shortfall of nearly 600,000 metric tons, marking a 27% annual decline.
These challenges have pushed prices to record highs. Although prices have fallen 23% year on year, they remain 98% higher in 2025 than the five-year average.
The industry’s ongoing volatility has left manufacturers with limited ways to shield themselves from rising costs, so some are being forced to cut production. The larger companies are adopting other strategies – changing pack sizes, increasing prices, modifying formulations by using alternative ingredients to cocoa, and reducing cocoa content.
What does this mean for you?
What can catering teams do to mitigate rising prices? Understanding where cocoa comes from, who grows it, and how it’s farmed will help you to pass on that knowledge to your students, diners or residents.
Cocoa prices are high but that doesn’t mean chocolate has to vanish from your menus. It’s an opportunity to tweak your menus to add alternative ingredients or focus on quality rather than quantity.
For optimum transparency, you could use a tool to monitor your carbon footprint and help you adapt to a more sustainable way of operating, not just when it comes to chocolate.
The Foodsteps platform utilises a database that enables caterers and consumers to view the impact of their recipes and ingredients on the climate. This is done through a rating system of A to E that mirrors traffic light reporting of nutritional information on food packaging. Foodsteps shows caterers and consumers alike the Kg CO2e per serving. It also shows the traffic light carbon intensity (Kg /CO2e per Kg).
The type of measurement enabled by Foodsteps can play an important role in:
• measuring and reducing company food emissions
• creating greater transparency within our supply chains
• educational tool
• directly empowers you to make more sustainable food choices
allmanhall can also provide you with sustainability dashboards, which track the provenance of your ingredients. Why? Because appreciating what lies behind our food from an environmental and social perspective should be as clear as measuring quality, taste, and cost.
Chocolate prices will eventually come down to a new (higher) normal. But the bigger question – about its environmental impact, human cost and future resilience – will remain. With our expert insight into the food supply chain, allmanhall will keep you abreast of the latest news so that you have everything you need to make informed decisions.