As you pass out treats to children in the U.S. who dress as ghosts and goblins on Halloween night you might be interested to know that cocoa farmers are finding ways to increase their incomes and provide better lives for their children.
Late last week Nestle, among the largest purchasers of cocoa beans in the world with operations in 32 countries, announced a “Cocoa Plan” to help improve cocoa farmer profitability and cocoa bean quality. The plan includes providing farmers with better varieties of cocoa trees, farmer education to help farmers become more profitable and buying co-ops to provide farmer services and allow group (more profitable) pricing for farmers. Nestle will invest $109 million in these ”sustainability initiatives” for the cocoa sector in the next decade.
To quote Nestle’s excellent new website on The Cocoa Plan, “Without farmers, there’d be no cocoa. Without cocoa, there’d be no chocolate. Cocoa farmers are the vital start-point and they can benefit considerably from our help.”
Nestle joins a growing list of companies making substantial commitments to cocoa farming. Mars has announced that the company has pledged to purchase 100,000 tons of sustainably grown certified cocoa by 2020. We did an earlier blog on Cadbury’s Fair Trade chocolate initiative in the U.K. where all Cadbury milk chocolate bars will be certified Fair Trade, increasing the amount of Fair Trade chocolate sold in the U.K. by 25 percent over 2008.
The World Cocoa Foundation last week announced the launch of its Cocoa Livelihoods program in Ghana. The program, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and 12 chocolate companies, is expected to improve the livelihoods of nearly 60,000 farmers in Ghana over the next 5 years. “Making real progress against hunger and poverty starts with small farmers,” explains Richard Rogers of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The goals of these initiatives are similar; they work to ensure that cocoa farm families have greater opportunities for economic development. Along the way they encourage access to quality education for children and adults. It’s a good goal for children of cocoa farmers, farmers themselves, the cocoa companies and consumers of chocolate everywhere.
Cocoa Beans by Nestlé.
We received a press release today from a good friend of ours at Nestle USA, Ms. Patricia Bowles. Nestle is running a video making contest “How Far Would You Go to Protect your Butterfinger Bar?” The Butterfinger folks are looking for an “irreverently clever commercial creator” (Carl, they’re calling your name) to capture the best “crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery” experience via video. The grand prize winner gets $25,000, and a one-year supply of Butterfinger candy bars for starters. Three other “first prize winners” get $1,000 each and a year’s supply of Butterfingers.
People — enter this contest! Money, Butterfinger bars and a chance to have your video all over the Internet? What’s not to like? Tricia adds, “We know that no one can express the one-of-a-kind Butterfinger experience better than a real-world fan.” It appears that Butterfinger fans also are “avid” social media users, hence the perfect storm of a contest involving candy, social media and irreverence.
Will you dare to enter?
Butterfinger by donny27.
Happy Canada Day! This photo by Flickr user Zorbs isn’t necessarily a spectacular photo in terms of composition or lighting but part of what makes a picture special has nothing to do with the technical aspects of photography. This photo is special because it captures the festivity of an important day. Red and white Smarties emblazoned with a maple leaf – it doesn’t get much more celebratory than that!
Smarties are candy-coated chocolates made by Nestle. My wife, a native of Canada, told me about them when we were first dating. “You mean like M&Ms?” I asked. “Not quite,” she said. She was right. They are similar but definitely different.
What led to further confusion was that what we call Smarties – those delicious sugar tablets in a plastic sleeve – are known as Rockets in Canada. It’s like they have a different word for everything. And they put the letter “u” in places I don’t understand.
I will be spending Friday driving up to Toronto to visit my in-laws and will be reporting next week from Canada’s candy capitol and home to Laura Secord chocolate company. I am assuming that’s Toronto. Wish me luck. I will try to bring home some souvenir extra “u”s for us all to share.
Do you want your candy photos featured here? Submit them to the Candy Dish Blog Flickr group. We want to see your candy photos and so does the rest of the world!
As you may know, NCA’s offices recently moved and for about a week it seemed like utter chaos. However, we have all the boxes unpacked, all the candy unloaded and it is starting to feel like home now. Even though NCA has a strict no pets policy, Tori and I were able to bring our old pal Farfel, the friendly Nestle chocolate dog we have grown to love, even if he does scare our coworker’s college-age daughter.
Farfel looks pretty relaxed there, sitting in the window overlooking the historic C&O Canal in Georgetown. I hope he likes his new digs as much as the rest of us do. Farfel has been good to us, even though he is thought to be the one who helped Susan eat the circus peanuts last week.
Yuck. Dog germs.
Fortune Magazine recently released a list of the most admired companies. The survey asked businesspeople to vote for companies they admired most from any industry. Nestlé, the Swiss company widely known for its chocolate, snacks, instant beverages and many other products, ranked number 38 on the list. Among consumer food product companies, it ranked number one. Kraft Foods, makers of Toblerone and Milka Chocoloates, ranked number seven and Cadbury plc ranked number eight.
That’s a whole bunch of candy companies in the top ten consumer food products category. Way to go!
Funny – just last night I rediscovered some chocolate Nestlé Quik I had apparently stashed in the cupboard, hidden apparently for some sort of chocolate drink emergency. It was exactly what I wanted even though I thought I was looking for something else. Funny how that happens. Do you have a favorite Nestlé product?
Nestlé Quik by Roadsidepictures.
