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Comment by yunwal | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, what are those companies? Is fair trade a good indicator or just marketing?

There may be others, but this brand has made it their focus: https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/our-mission

Yeah but the question is where's the proof that they actually put that into practice. Because all large corporations are full of ESG and greenwashing messages on their websites but we all know the reality is different. Missions statements are cheap.

Tony's Chocolonely is an interesting brand, because its origin lies in a Dutch TV show investigating consumer goods. At some point, the presenter ("Tony" [1]) decided to sue himself for buying slave chocolate, and then decided to see how hard it actually is to make slave-free chocolate - and Tony's Chocolonely was born.

As I understand it they're less strictly idealistic than they used to be so as to be a profitable business, but at least it wasn't an attempt at fairwashing an existing brand.

[1] Actually Teun (van de Keuken), but that doesn't work well in English.

>van de Keuken

Ha, Neuken in de Keuken, is the only Dutch I know.

Turns out that "in the kitchen" (or "of the kitchen", in this case) is actually regular vernacular as well :)

What kind of proof would you want?

Something more than "trust me bro". Something like a third party auditor confirming their claims.

Very reasonable to be skeptical of these kind of things, but this company seems to be the real deal: https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/annual-fair-reports

Their original slogan was "100 percent slave free" and they changed it to "towards 100 percent slave free" a while back.

Nowadays their slogan is "Crazy about chocolate. Serious about people".

They seem to constantly weaken their slogan.

Have a look here, table should be understandable without knowing german: https://makechocolatefair.org/nachhaltigkeitssiegel-fuer-sch...

As suspected, UTZ guarantees are weakest by far.

> table should be understandable without knowing german

The "Ja" and "Nein" parts are, but I don't think, for example, "Rückverfolgbarkeit" is understandable without knowing German (having to know "UTZ" means "Rainforest Alliance" is a different issue).

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