Child Labour in Chocolate: The 7 Companies Named and What Changed

Child Labour in Cocoa: The 2016 Call to Avoid Seven Chocolate Companies

Most of the world's chocolate starts on small family farms in West Africa, and on many of those farms children do heavy and dangerous work. In 2016 campaigners asked shoppers to stop buying from seven well-known names: Hershey, Mars, Nestlé, ADM Cocoa, Godiva, Fowler's Chocolate and Kraft. Their argument was simple. None of these firms could show that the cocoa in their bars had been grown without child labour.

Years later, the problem is still there. A survey carried out for the US Department of Labor estimated that about 1.56 million children were doing cocoa-related child labour in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana during the 2018/19 harvest. Dropping a few brands from your shopping list does little by itself. It helps far more to know where the problem comes from, which promises the industry broke, and what kind of buying actually puts money in farmers' pockets.

Why chocolate and child labour are linked

Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana grow close to 60 percent of the world's cocoa. In the 2018/19 season Côte d'Ivoire alone produced about 35 percent of global supply and Ghana about 21 percent, while West Africa as a whole accounts for roughly seven beans in ten. Almost all of it comes from smallholdings of a few hectares, and the beans pass through local buyers, exporters and grinders before they reach a factory in Europe or North America.

Farmers receive a small slice of what a bar sells for, and many cocoa-growing households live below the poverty line. When a family cannot pay for hired help, children are drawn in. The riskiest jobs are clearing land with machetes, carrying heavy sacks of beans, spraying pesticides without protection and burning fields. These are the tasks the International Labour Organization counts as hazardous work, and they are very different from a child helping out for an hour after school.

It is also worth being precise about the word "slavery". Most children working in cocoa labour on their own family's farm. A smaller group has been trafficked from neighbouring countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso and works far from home under someone else's control. Studies suggest that around 1 percent of children in cocoa child labour in the two countries could be in forced labour or at risk of it, which in a sector this large still means thousands of children.

Their stories reached a wide audience through the documentary Slavery: A Global Investigation (2000), in which young men freed from Ivorian farms described long days of work and frequent violence. One of them, Aly Diabate, summed it up in a single line: "The beatings were a part of my life."

The seven companies named in 2016, and why

The call to avoid seven companies was published by Collective Evolution in May 2016. It followed a set of US consumer lawsuits filed in September 2015 against Hershey, Mars and Nestlé, which argued that the firms' packaging should have warned buyers that their cocoa might have been produced with child or forced labour. The list named:

Hershey
Mars
Nestlé
ADM Cocoa
Godiva
Fowler's Chocolate
Kraft

The list mixed very different businesses. Hershey, Mars and Nestlé are among the largest chocolate makers in the world. ADM was a grain trader whose cocoa-processing arm was sold to Olam in 2015, so by the time the list circulated it was no longer in the cocoa business. Kraft's chocolate brands, including Cadbury, moved to Mondelez International when Kraft split in 2012. Godiva is a premium brand, and Fowler's is a small family confectioner in the Buffalo, New York area; it is unclear why it was singled out next to global giants.

The underlying point was fair, though. At the time, Green America, a US non-profit that campaigns for ethical consumer choices, said that no major chocolate company could guarantee its cocoa supply was free of child labour, while noting that most had launched sustainability programmes under consumer pressure.

A deadline that kept moving

The industry first made a public commitment in 2001. After news reports about trafficked children on Ivorian farms, US Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Eliot Engel brokered what became known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol. Mars, Ferrero, Hershey, Kraft Foods, Nestlé and others backed it.

The aim was to remove the worst forms of child labour, including forced labour, from cocoa growing in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, with a system of certification in place by July 2005. That date was missed and pushed back three years. In 2008 it was extended again to the end of 2010. A 2010 framework then set a new goal: a 70 percent reduction in the worst forms of child labour in the two countries by 2020. By late 2015 that target was nowhere near being met, which is the backdrop to the 2016 campaign.

What the surveys actually found

The best data come from large household surveys funded by the US Department of Labor. Tulane University ran the earlier rounds, and its 2015 report described a sharp rise in the number of children working in cocoa between 2008/09 and 2013/14. That is where the widely repeated "51 percent increase" comes from.

The next round, carried out by NORC at the University of Chicago and published in October 2020, changed the picture in an important way. NORC found that earlier estimates had been distorted by weighting errors, so the numbers from different years cannot be compared directly. Its own estimate for 2018/19 was about 1.56 million children in child labour in the cocoa areas of the two countries, with around 1.48 million of them doing hazardous work. That is about 43 percent of children living in agricultural households in cocoa-growing regions. Among cocoa-growing households, NORC saw no statistically significant change in the share of children working since 2013/14.

So the 2020 target was missed. The World Cocoa Foundation, the industry's main body, later admitted that the goals had been set without a full grasp of how complex and large the problem was.

What happened to the lawsuits

The 2015 consumer cases against Hershey, Mars and Nestlé were dismissed in 2016, and the plaintiffs appealed. A similar case in Massachusetts reached the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which ruled unanimously in June 2020 that state labelling laws did not oblige the companies to mention forced child labour on their wrappers.

A separate case went further. Six men from Mali said they had been trafficked as children to work on Ivorian cocoa farms and sued Nestlé USA and Cargill under the Alien Tort Statute. In June 2021 the US Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that the claim could not go forward, because the conduct the men described in the United States was too general to tie the companies to the abuse. In 2021 another group of young Malian men filed a new suit against several large chocolate and cocoa firms. In short, the courts have not been the route to change that campaigners hoped for.

Is there an ethical chocolate list you can trust?

The 2016 article also offered a list of smaller companies it described as more socially conscious: Giddy Yoyo, Chocosol, Clif Bar, Green and Black's, Koppers Chocolate, L.A. Burdick Chocolates, Denman Island Chocolate, Gardners Candies, Montezuma's Chocolates, Newman's Own Organics, Kailua Candy Company, Omanhene Cocoa Bean Company, Rapunzel Pure Organics, The Endangered Species Chocolate Company and Cloud Nine.

Lists like this age quickly. Green and Black's has been part of Mondelez since Kraft bought Cadbury in 2010, and Mondelez also bought Clif Bar in 2022. A change of owner does not automatically change where the cocoa comes from, but it is a good reason to check rather than trust an old list. A few questions are more useful than any brand name:

Can the company trace its cocoa? Firms that buy from named cooperatives or farms can check conditions; those buying on the open market usually cannot.
Does it pay above the market price? Poverty is the root cause, so a premium or a long-term contract that reaches farmers matters. In 2019 Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana added a "living income differential" of 400 US dollars a tonne to their cocoa sales for this reason.
Does it monitor and fix problems? Child labour monitoring and remediation systems, run with groups such as the International Cocoa Initiative, send local staff to identify children at risk and help families with school costs or labour. A 2018 Nestlé pilot with around 26,000 farmers reported a 51 percent fall in children doing hazardous jobs among those it reached.
What does the label actually certify? Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance seals lower the risk and set rules on child labour, but their effect on farmers' incomes has been questioned and neither is a guarantee.

Independent groups such as the Food Empowerment Project keep updated chocolate lists that rate companies on sourcing, and they are a better starting point than a list from 2016.

Common myths about chocolate and child labour

"If enough people boycott the big brands, the problem ends." Cocoa farmers sell into one market, and a sudden drop in demand mainly lowers what they are paid. Pressure for traceability, better prices and monitoring tends to help children more than a boycott.

"Organic chocolate is child-labour free." Organic certification covers how crops are grown, not who grows them. Some organic brands source carefully; the label itself does not prove it.

"Every child on a cocoa farm is a slave." Most working children are on their own family's farm, pushed there by poverty and poor access to schools. Forced labour and trafficking are real but affect a smaller group, and the two problems need different solutions.

"The industry fixed this years ago." The 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2020 targets were all missed, and the 2018/19 survey still counted well over a million children in hazardous cocoa work.

A bar of chocolate is a small pleasure, and nobody needs to give it up. Buying from companies that can show where their cocoa comes from and what they pay for it, and asking the brands you like to do the same, is a realistic way to make that pleasure cost less for the children who grow it.

Sources: original campaign article by Collective Evolution (2016); Wikipedia: Children in cocoa production (Harkin-Engel Protocol, Tulane and NORC surveys, lawsuits); ConfectioneryNews: NORC final report (October 2020); Courthouse News: chocolate makers face slave labour lawsuits (2015); Fortune: Big Chocolate's child labor problem; Slavery: A Global Investigation (documentary).

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