Now days, we visit ‘Olive Young’ to buy cosmetics and daily necessities. It also sells simple foods such as tea, vitamins, and snacks. The Olive Young simple food stand also displays overseas chocolate, which is hard to buy at convenience stores and local marts.

 Recently, Olive Young’s new chocolate, Tony’ Chocolonely, is sold under the nickname Good Chocolate, piled up in vivid color paper packaging such as yellow and blue. In addition, its products are twice the price of chocolate we usually eat.

 A full of questions, why is this 'good chocolate' and how does is taste? Tony’s Chocolonely, we’re so curious about you!

Tony's Chocolonely

 Tony’s Chocolonely is commonly called good chocolate. What comes to your mind when you see a product with the modifier ‘nice’? Good ingredients? Affordable products? Or affordable products made with good ingredients, so-called cost-effectiveness products? There may be various opinions. The word ‘nice chocolate’, which refers to Tony’s Chocolonely, means chocolate made from ‘fair trade’.

 Teun van de Keuken, the founder of Tony’s Chocolonely, is an investigative journalist. In 2004, he covered poor labor conditions in cacao productions in West Africa. He learned that about two million children in Ghana and Ivory Coast were in illegal working conditions. In order to let the bitter reality of being hidden in sweet chocolate, he documented his report. Teun van de Keuken called himself a person who ate illegally produced chocolate and reported himself to the police.

 To solve this unfair trade problem, Tony’s Chocolonely introduced a system called ‘bean tracker’ into the cacao supply chain. The ‘bean tracker’ i s a technology system that records data on all the cooperative systems necessary for production, such as cacao cultivation, distribution, chocolate production, packaging, etc., and examines which stage of the supply chain cacao is at. This -said- is important software of Tony’s Chocolonely.

 Tony’s Chocolonely can find out which farm owner produced how much cacao through their software. In addition, It can know conditions the farm owner needs to cultivate cacao and provides them to owner. By establishing the ‘bean tracker’ called software and industry standard, growers and traders can check shipments and payments in real time. In other words, it is to implement a fair trade system that transparently discloses all transactions.

Continuous Efforts 

 In summary, Tony’s Chocolonely is striving to provide fair profits to cacao plantation owners and eradicate child labor through their software, the fair trade system. Not only the trade system, but they are also working on various aspects. Tony’s Chocolonely is carving chocolate in a shape that resembles an African country. Through this, it implicitly tells consumers that the African country is suffering from unfair trade.

 When Tony’s Chocolonely purchases a ton of cacao, it pays $200 fair trade premium and $175 extra under the name of Tony’s premium to make more profit for the cacao plantation owners. Due to this trade policy, Tony’s Chocolonely is more expensive than other chocolates. Besides promoting the ethical value of fair trade to offset the downside of “Price”, it is making other efforts. Tony’s Chocolonely catches the eye of consumers by using colorful packaging and designs, launches new flavors every year, and travel around the city in chocolate truck to offer free tasting to people.

 Tony’s Chocolonely, which took quite a long time to come near us since its founding in the Netherlands in 2005. Their foremost purpose and goal, the ethical value of fair trade, is of course important. However, it is also noteworthy that consumption is induced by continuously making efforts to solve the problem of high place.

 In fact, I started writing this column because I was curious about the keyword ‘good chocolate’ after tasting the Tony’s Chocolonely I found accidentally in Olive Young. I think it would be a good idea to pay attention to Tony’s Chocolonely, which you’ve newly learned through this column, if you find it somewhere.

이연수  lys0716@inha.edu

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