One Minute Brief of the Day:

Create posters to bring to life the benefits of putting people before profit in the chocolate industry.

Tweet your entries to @OneMinuteBriefs & @Tonyschocouk_ie with the hashtag #TheBigChocoSale

Remember to include your Twitter handle in the corner of your entries. You can also tag @Tonyschocolonely and @TonyschocoUS in your submissions.

The Big Choco Sale – a new low for cocoa

Everyone loves a sale, right? Well, this one is a bit different.. it’s a steal.

On 1st October, the government of Ivory Coast announced its new cocoa farmgate price (the minimum price cocoa buyers have to pay) has decreased to USD$1,457 per tonne in 21/22 from USD$1788 per tonne in 20/21 – a devastating drop of 18.5%.

This means farmers, who are already living way below the poverty line, will earn 18.5% less for the cocoa they sell this season. That’s the difference between feeding your family and going hungry, between children going to school or doing dangerous work on cocoa farms.

This price drop will likely have no impact on the price of chocolate for consumers. It is expected that savings will not be passed on and instead some big chocolate companies will enjoy greater profits as they did when the farmgate price dropped in mid-2017. [1]

We are calling on all chocolate companies to match the price we pay for cocoa – the Living Income Reference Price developed with Fairtrade – to enable cocoa farmers to earn a living income, a crucial step in driving modern slavery and illegal child labour out of the industry. We are also calling on chocolate-lovers to ask their favourite chocolate brands to increase how much their pay for their cocoa instead of profiting from paying even less.

At Tony’s we voluntarily pay a higher price for our cocoa. We pay an additional premium and a co-op fee on top of the Fairtrade premium to bridge the gap between farmgate price and Living Income Reference Price. The total Tony’s premium paid on top of the farmgate price will increase from $462 to $793 per tonne of cocoa in 2021/22 to ensure farmers are not impacted by this significant price drop.

We need you!

This is a complicated message and we don’t want that to mean that it gets buried in the commodity trading press (no offense to them..), we want to make noise about it! Help us show the positive human impact it can have when big companies make people as important as profit.

Create posters to show the benefits of putting people before profit in the chocolate industry.

The rules:

Focus on the positive impact it can have if people are paid properly by big chocolate companies
We aren’t negative, we want to encourage big companies to do the right thing by showing them the benefits of doing so
We treat people and companies with respect
We are crazy about chocolate, serious about people. The brighter/more colourful/crazier the better!

Check out the video below for an example of how we have done this before.

Source:

1. Cocoa Barometer 2018, Page 13 - Where is the money going?

More info here:

https://tonyschocolonely.com/uk/en/our-mission/news/big-choco-sale-its-a-steal

https://tonyschocolonely.com/uk/en

The Prizes:

1st Place: £300 and a year’s supply of Tony’s Chocolonely

2nd Place: £200 and a hamper of Tony’s Chocolonely goodies

3rd Place £100 and a hamper of Tony’s Chocolonely goodies