A Guide to Buying Ethical Chocolates
Chocolate has always been something of a guilty pleasure but the devil has always been in the calorie count. Now however we understand the origins of our chocolate and there’s a new guilt based on the ethics behind its manufacturer and transportation. Can there be a ‘green’ way to buy chocolate? Well, fairtrade organic chocolates are your best bet (and a great gift) so here’s a quick guide on how to choose your treats.
How ‘green’ is chocolate?
For most of the world’s population chocolate can never be truly local because cacao beans can only be grown in tropical and equatorial climates. Ultimately this means that chocolate manufacture is going to involve shipping at some point and that increases carbon emissions. That’s the downside, the upside is that cacao beans, like coffee beans, are produced within infrastructures that allow fair trade bodies to oversee the agricultural process and so ensure that communities receive a fair price.