At Puro Chocolate we introduce you to Teun van de Keuken, better known as “Tony”, a Dutch television host who created one of the best-selling chocolate brands in the Netherlands, Tony's Chocolonely, to raise awareness among the competition of eliminating from their production line slave practices
After discovering the worst working conditions in the cocoa plantations in West Africa, where important chocolate industries access this fruit for the production of their finest chocolates, Teun van de Keuken decides to found one of the most successful chocolate shops in Holland, Tony's Chocolonely, to promote the consumption of this sweet food "100% free of slavery".
The idea of creating this brand of chocolate was not in van de Keuken's head until he discovered in 2002, during a journalistic investigation into the industry of this sweet food, that almost no chocolatier in the world was free of slave labor.
After about three years of failed attempts to make the chocolate industry guarantee the elimination of illegalities such as child labor in its production line, this journalist decided in 2005 to make his own chocolate following the conventions fair trade, as an example “on how to change an industry and solve a global problem”.
The pieces of the inequality of the bar Tony's Chocolonely
Despite promoting itself as a chocolate in which there is no slave labor on its production line, the asymmetry of the squares of the Tony chocolate bar denounces the inequality that exists within the chocolate industry.
Not all pieces are the same size, thus conveying that the income obtained from a chocolate bar does not generate the same benefits during the production process, with cocoa farmers being the most helpless.
As for the diversity of flavors of this chocolate bar, it varies according to the country and the marketing channel, however, according to its portal, there are the following presentations:
- Milk chocolate 32%, 180 grams, 1 ounce
- Caramel milk chocolate and sea salt 32%, 180 grams, 1 ounce
- Milk chocolate with almond nougat and honey 32%, 180 gram, 1 bar
- Chocolate with almond and sea salt 51%, 180 grams, 1 ounce
- Milk chocolate and hazelnut 32%, 180 grams, 1 bar
- Pure chocolate 70%, 180 grams, 1 ounce
In the documentary The Chocolate Case, made in 2016 by the Dutch director Benthe Forrer, tells how Teun van de Keuken and the rest of the team of journalists from the television program Keuringsdienst van Waarde enter the chocolate industry, discovering the use of slave labor in the West African cocoa plantations.
And in his attempt to persuade them to eliminate this practice, van de Keuken ends up creating his own brand of slave-free chocolate to compete with the rest of the chocolate factories.
