Some Truths About Your Chocolate, by The Chocolate Tree

Many thanks to Ali from The Chocolate Tree for taking the time to write this myth-busting piece for us. We’ve learnt a lot from Ali over time, particularly about being curious - if not downright wary - about the marketing claims made by some brands.

We met the founders of The Crunchy Carrot at Knockengorroch music festival in Dumfriesshire some 18 years ago. It’s where we started Chocolate Tree, as a travelling chocolaterie housed in our hand built solar powered geodesic dome tent. We received such a good response that the brand has gone on to be a quite well-known! Our chocolate can be found at independent retailers across the UK, and beyond. We are very grateful for our modest success and are proud to now be able to give 1% of our annual revenue to environmental non-profits in return.

Crunchy Carrot became the first of many independent retailers that we now supply with our bars, hot chocolate, chocolate covered goodies and more, and we are happy to have moved our factory to just down the road from Dunbar at Knowes Farm. I enjoy making the deliveries, picking up a spinach & feta pie [made by Dunbar Community Bakery!] for lunch, and talking with the Crunchy team. We’ve always loved working with indies and have no intention to see our chocolate in any of the supermarkets.

Manager Helen kindly asked me to write a little about chocolate for the Crunchy newsletter, as I’ve always quite a lot to say about chocolate, and she thought it would be good to share some of this with Community Carrot members.

Why is Chocolate Tree different?

Back when we started in 2005, the marketplace wasn’t saturated with chocolate brands. If you searched organic Scottish chocolate on Google, Chocolate Tree would be top of the list. Now, things are different. The marketplace is full of competing chocolate brands, all shouting out for attention, and paying for it. To stay visible online we now pay a marketing firm every month just to show up on the first Google page.

We don’t mind competition, it’s healthy. What we do take an exception to though is misleading and false marketing, as this gives an unfair advantage to chocolate brands who are unscrupulous.

We’ve not always made chocolate. For a long time, we used a Belgian organic fairtrade chocolate to make our bars. But we have never pretended otherwise. It wasn’t until 2011 that we bought our first cocoa refiners and started to make chocolate from ‘bean to bar’. We now make all our chocolate, either from organic cocoa ‘liquor’ or organic cocoa beans. Chocolate Tree is the only chocolate that’s really made in Scotland available in the wholesale catalogue of Green City (the Glasgow based wholesaler supplying many a Scottish indie shop). We’re very proud of that.

130kg of Peruvian Amazonas cacao beans going through the oven for our 100g organic craft chocolate bars.

The first chocolate brand to be held accountable for pretending to make their own chocolate was The Mast Brothers in New York. The bearded hipsters were re-melting a French chocolate and calling it their own. In 2015 the Mast Brothers received a 4-part defamation by Dallas food blogger Scott Craig called ‘What Lies Behind the Beards’. Mast Brothers had opened stores in LA, New York and London, before it all came tumbling down after Scott’s article went viral and hit the headlines.

I once saw a talk by Chloé Doutre-Roussel, author of The Chocolate Connoisseur and previous chocolate buyer at Fortnum & Masons, who said the problem was there was no ‘Chocolate Police’. There’s no accountability.

Here are some examples we’ve seen on chocolate packaging recently which are plainly wrong:

“Wild” which would indicate wild ingredients, of which there are certainly none being used in the product.

“Farm to Bar” A term that applies to cacao farmers who also make chocolate from the cacao they farm, often involving great labour. Recently seen on a chocolate bar for which the production was entirely outsourced.

“The world’s first slave free chocolate.” This is plainly wrong, and perhaps quite insulting to the intelligence of this brand’s target market. I would say chocolate existed long before slavery, and today our own brand along with many others have been making ‘slave free’ chocolate since we started.

There is another well-known chocolate company, recently bought out by Mars inc for over £500 million that claims to be a “British chocolate manufacturer and cocoa grower” but I was informed they buy most of their chocolate from the Swiss giant Callebaut.

We think that the most important thing to build with our customers is trust. We’re not trying to grow the company fast and sell out. Our tree is based on slow organic growth, firm roots and a sturdy trunk. There has been much pruning to be done, and we are grateful to receive the fruits and flowers of our labour. We’ve weathered more than a few storms.

We are part of the economic fabric of Scotland, running a small business which benefits our local economy the most. We’ve found by remaining honest we are keeping our integrity that we’ve built a loyal customer base. Trust is at the core, and we don’t need to lie to get ahead.

Slave free chocolate

On reading Tim Spector’s book Food for Life recently, a great book on gut health, we were shocked to find that Tim recommended Tony’s Chocolonley as one of ‘the best producers’ of chocolate. We wrote to Tim to let him know that Tony’s don’t produce any chocolate. It’s all made for them by Callebaut. The Chocolate Case, a film produced by the original founders of this chocolate brand shows how a group of well-intentioned Dutch journalists seeking to expose slavery in the West African cocoa industry ended up at the helm of a multinational company which was unable to rule out child labour from the supply chain. Yes, that’s right, Tony’s is still ‘on the journey’ to a slave free chocolate. You can read it between the lines.

Tony’s have however been making a much-needed storm in the chocolate industry. They are bringing attention to and addressing the forced and child labour issue where it exists, in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Callebaut and other big industry chocolate manufacturers made a pledge to remove child labour from its supply chain by 2005, yet it continues today as evidenced in the films of Miki Mistrati (such as The Chocolate War). Callebaut continue to supply chocolatiers across the world with chocolate made from untraceable West African cacao. This is most of the chocolate on the premium market, still being used in high-end restaurants, bakeries and chocolatiers.

In the UK a new company from Colombia, Casa Luker, has managed to take a big chunk of the Callebaut market share, as they are boasting a family ran B-Corp certified business from South America as an alternative to Callebaut. Many of the UK chocolate brands are now made from Casa Luker chocolate. Some will tell you, and others won’t. They might just mention a Colombian family farm as the origin. Although still a family business, Casa Luker are huge, with a revenue in the multi-millions and exports all over the world. Their UK revenue alone was £6.5 million last year. On my trips to Colombia I have heard of other, smaller cacao cooperatives having trouble reaching the export market due to Casa Luker’s dominance, but the company remains a better alternative to Callebaut.

In South America, where we buy all our cacao from cooperatives supplied by smallholder farmers (small family ran farms) practising organic agroforestry, the culture is very different from Africa. Slavery and child labour isn’t a common issue in South and Central America, and cacao has been cultivated and used by humans there for thousands of years, unlike Africa where it was introduced as a commercial crop in the early nineteenth century, on plantations.

Peruvian cacao

My point is, using ‘slave free’ as a marketing tool for a chocolate brand using South American cacao is somewhat useless when it comes to tackling the actual problem. The expense of implementing a certification that really stamps out forced labour from the supply chain would have much more credibility if it were implemented in West Africa, where forced and child labour is sadly ongoing today.

Handling the cocoa price crisis, and factory tours!

Earlier this year we were given notice that the price of the South American organic cacao beans, liquor and butter we buy would be going up significantly, due to low harvests in West Africa and decades of under-investment there by big industry. An increase in the commodity price from around $3 to $10 meant that farmers across the globe who had cacao were able to sell it at the farm gate for more than triple the previous price.

In response we bought up as much cacao as we could before it went unbelievably high. We hope to keep our pricing as it is for the foreseeable future, and to do so we are going to install a drum roaster at the factory which will remove our bottleneck, enabling our production to become more efficient. Efficiency has always been the way in which we are able to offer you an authentic ethical, organic and artisanal product at a reasonable price. When we install this big shiny new roaster, we’ll also hopefully start doing tours at the factory, giving you the chance to come and learn about real chocolate making, taking you through our chocolate making process. Keep an eye out in later this year (or possibly in 2025) for the start of our factory tours and tastings.

Ali & Friederike winning best new organic food product at the Natural Food Expo in April 2024.

We’d like to take the opportunity to say a huge thank you to everyone who’s been supporting us over the years. We hope you can taste the difference with our chocolate! If you ever have feedback for us, please do let us know. We’ll keep making the best organic chocolate we can for you, high in cocoa and free from misleading marketing claims.

Look out for our chocolate in the Crunchy Carrot and keep in touch, we’re @ChocTreeScotland on Instagram or Facebook.