- cross-posted to:
- buyeuropean@feddit.uk
- cross-posted to:
- buyeuropean@feddit.uk
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/42772420
Tony’s Chocolonely is a Dutch chocolate manufacturer and seller. Created in 2005, the company’s market share in the Netherlands was 18 percent in 2018.
In 2022, the Thomson Reuters Foundation awarded Tony’s Chocolonely the Stop Slavery Award in the category “Goods and Services Companies”. This award recognizes companies and organizations who have set a high standard for eradicating slavery, illegal child labor, and human trafficking from their supply chains.
Tony’s Chocolonely was ranked second on the 2023 Chocolate Scorecard, which rates chocolate companies according to their human rights and environmental credentials: traceability and transparency, living income for cocoa farmers, child labour (absence of), deforestation & climate, agroforestry, and agrochemical management.
Their response https://tonyschocolonely.com/blogs/other/a-small-update-on-health-and-safety-and-heavy-metals
While I appreciate their response, I’d rather they implement a process safety management system. While cadmium and lead accumulate differently, lead accumulation can be fixed by covering the drying beans from lead dust, or moving them to areas where lead pollution isn’t present. Cadmium tends to accumulate in older plants, and is pulled up from the soil. Planting newer trees, or changing the soil composition could limit the amount of cadmium present before it ever enters the supply chain.
Even if it does enter the supply chain, they could blend hazardous beans with cleaner beans to at least reduce the amount of exposure to heavy metals (of which no amount is truly safe.) You also get routine exposure through toothpaste and (potentially) drinking water, among other things.