Tony’s has a very clear mission: together we make 100% slave free the norm in chocolate. We do this by ensuring that farmers have a five-year commitment to sales at a higher price for their traceable cocoa beans. Through this, we ensure that cocoa farmers get a fair piece of the choco pie and work towards ending modern slavery, illegal child labor, and deforestation. Because it’s poverty that causes these abuses. And.. you probably have noticed that everything has become more expensive: the resources for our bars, but also the costs for farming are no exception. Because we want to keep enabling farmers to earn a living income, we are introducing new prices for our choco bars. Let us explain!
Keep paying farmers a fair price
Inflation has affected everyone, including farmers in West Africa, and because of this we have already increased the price we paid farmers for their cocoa last year. To enable them to earn a living income. The new reference price for a living income is on average 80% higher than the minimum price cocoa farmers get for their cocoa (the farmgate price that Big Choco pays). Last year, we’ve paid a higher price to almost 15,000 farmers and invested 8 million euros in impact. But hey.. we are an impact company.. So up until now nothing crazy.
At the same time, because of inflation, we have also been dealing with rising costs in production and transportation of our chocolate. Ingredients for our crazy bars also further continued to increase in price. Earlier these added costs had already caused an increase of 13%. That’s why we had to increase the price of our bars slightly. Meanwhile these costs have amounted and increased to an added 21% than it was in October 2021. (Pff.. that’s a lot)
Looking at October 2021 these were our significant increases:
- Sugar price has increased by 115%
- The costs of packaging have increased by 77%
- The costs for other ingredients have increased by 18%
- The cost for milk powder increased by 13%
Our mission is our #1 focus
In order to still pay farmers a higher price so they can earn a living income, and to cover the added costs, we will be introducing a new price as of April 3rd, 2023. The newly suggested retail price for our 180-gram bar will be €3.69.
With this new retail price, we will continue to keep track of our mission and keep a balance between the costs and expenses. We are a company after all, and we want to show the industry that it is possible to be commercially successful whilst making impact at the same time. To inspire Big Choco to adopt our way of working and together work towards a slave-free chocolate world.
We can’t look into the future and predict how current inflation will develop. But one thing is clear: honesty is the best policy, just like our mission (duh..).
So.. share our chocolate, share our story, because only together can we make all chocolate 100% slave free.
