5 Things You Should Know Before Buying A Chocolate Bar

When it comes to buying a chocolate bar, things can get complicated. While you might be drawn to your favorite childhood treat, like a Kit Kat or Take 5 bar, you could change your mind when you find out more about how the chocolate was made. Chocolate production, especially mass-produced chocolate from the most prominent brands, has some unsavory practices, including environmental and human rights problems. There are some chocolate facts to take into consideration when choosing between all those bars in the candy aisle.

As Lela Nargi has reported for FoodPrint, cocoa is among a handful of commodity crops, including coffee, sugarcane and palm oil, that are “grown in the global south by impoverished smallholder farmers with no power in the supply chain. The purchase of these crops by multinational food and beverage corporations — to make your chocolate bars, cookies and more — supports lack of living wages, child/forced/forced child labor, sexual assault, and rampant deforestation.”