Sweet tooth? The most common item we reach for when we’re attacked by a craving is chocolate. It never gets old. However, to gobble mindlessly on mass produced chocolate bars and bombons has an enormous impact on the environment. As people enjoy big-name commercial chocolate bar on the couch, the chocolate industry continues to shrink the rainforests and emit a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, endlessly contributing towards climate change. And not only that, but did you know that most of the cacao produced for big companies (the ones that produce the chocolate that most people know, like Hersheys and Lindt) is produced in slavery conditions, where the workers don’t ever get to experiment what a chocolate tastes like? They work their whole lives with the cacao bean, not ever knowing the final product for which they’ve been working so hard.
But guess what? Diversity can be found if looked for and we at Mashpi Chocolate have found a way to make it so you don’t only enjoy the chocolate bar itself, but you can also enjoy knowing that your dollar is your vote and that you’re voting for regenerative and equitative practices. We, as a manufacturer, offer to our customers products that are beyond organic by using a regenerative and collaborative practice, which helps maintain and expand not only healthy ecosystems but also healthy communities.
Consciously Produced, Collaborative Chocolate For Conscious Consumers
The United States consumes about 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate annually. On average, it comes down to 11 pounds per person and let me ask you this: How much do you know about how it’s made, about the effects that the process has on the environment, and how much of this chocolate actually ends up in the trash? How much of it do we buy on Holidays just because we’re made to believe that it’s “what we’re supposed to do”? How much of this candy is special just because it is wrapped in a Halloween wrapper. Valentines? And please don’t get me started with Easter and all those plastic eggs.
Unfortunately, other countries do not lag behind. Switzerland, for example, consumes double the chocolate per Capita and if we look at the whole world, we can say that an astonishing 7.7 MILLION TONS of chocolate is sold in a year. What if all this chocolate was produced fairly? If it resulted in the workers getting a fair education and access to clean food and water? The chocolate that makes you feel good while watching a movie shouldn’t come at the expense of other people’s livelihoods.
When we started the Mashpi project we never thought that 12+ years later we would be talking about the chocolate industry, we had the idea of restoring the soil but somewhere along the way we turned into chocolate makers and this opened a whole new world for us to look into for fairness and equality. We knew that the industry had a problem but we felt far removed from it, and little by little the project gave us the opportunity to learn more and to offer an alternative in which our consumers can feel good about eating chocolate. We not only focus on producing in agroforestry parcels which actually renew the soil, but we have also focus all of our efforts in improving the community by offering jobs and education to people who used to not have either. We have created networks within the country in which we are able to share our knowledge about agroforestry, maintenance and recovery of seeds, non-conventional edible plants, female empowerment, development of organic fertilizers and best of all, we don’t only get to share that knowledge but we also get to learn from our neighbors.
To end this short blog post, we thank you for being here and taking the time to read through. In future blog posts we will break down how and why these things are important, and I hope you’re here for those as well. I am trying to keep these short and sweet as not to bore you, but there is SO much to talk about when it comes to chocolate! For now, bye and I hope you learned at least one new thing in the last five minutes.
