Talking Shop: The state of chocolate

Douglas Lamont, CEO at Tony’s Chocolonely, and Nick Saltarelli, Co-Founder at Mid-Day Squares, share the current state of the chocolate industry

Hey friends,

Welcome back to another issue of Talking Shop. This week we are diving into the world of chocolate to get a better sense of the chocolate industry. It feels fitting the week before Halloween.

In this issue we feature two chocolate brand operators.

• Douglas Lamont, CEO at Tony’s Chocolonely

• Nick Saltarelli is the Co-Founder at Mid-Day Squares (You can catch his episode from 2022 here!)

They break down innovations in the chocolate industry, how the high price of cocoa is impacting the market, supply chain and customer perception barriers amongst other things. Let’s get into it.

What is your company’s mission?

Douglas Lamont: Tony’s Chocolonely is on a mission to end exploitation in the cocoa industry, not just our chocolate but all chocolate worldwide. We’re an impact company that makes chocolate, not the other way around.

Our top priority is to build, prove and scale an impact led sourcing model, Tony’s 5 Sourcing Principles – a model that can be adopted by the whole industry. At the same time, by using this model, we’re growing a global chocolate brand to demonstrate that doing business responsibly is commercially viable.

Our strategy is built on three pillars:

1. Creating awareness: We’re raising awareness about child labour and exploitation in the cocoa industry. Change starts with understanding.

2. Leading by example: We show that chocolate can and should be made differently. For this to work, we have to make commercially successful chocolate without the use of forced labour or exploitation.

3. Inspiring to act: Through our global industry initiative, Tony’s Open Chain, we invite other cocoa-using companies to join us in sourcing cocoa responsibly using our 5 Sourcing Principles. By selling ethical cocoa to others, we accelerate industry-wide change and prove our model works at scale.

Nick Saltarelli: To save the world from the 2pm crash. No good decisions are made then. We want to help.

What is a ‘better-for-you’ chocolate product? Is it still a differentiator or has it become table stakes?

Douglas Lamont: Chocolate is a treat and like all good things, it’s best enjoyed in moderation. While we don’t offer sugar-free or low-sugar options, we believe ‘better-for-you’ should go beyond just nutritional claims. It’s not just about individual health but collective well-being by offering a chocolate option that benefits people, profit and planet.

All of our cocoa is sourced via our proven model, Tony’s 5 Sourcing Principles, which includes traceability, paying a higher price, strengthening farmer cooperatives, long-term commitments, and supporting productivity and quality. By following these principles, we address poverty in cocoa-growing communities in West Africa which is a direct link to forced labour, child labour and deforestation. Enabling cocoa farmers to earn a living income is essential to breaking this cycle.

A truly better-for-you chocolate is on that’s good for the people who enjoy it, the people who produce it, and the planet that we all share. We focus on chocolate that is tasty and rooted in social justice.

Nick Saltarelli: Better for you really just means lower everything. So I think we as consumers, and especially at Mid-Day Squares, are not trying to replace sugars with fake sugars, sugar, alcohols, or anything. We’re just like, what does a world look like in which we make delicious snacks that are just lower in sugar, that have some type of value add in it, like fiber and protein, so that it’s just a more rounded product? And so I think Better For You is table stakes of the future, but it’s not in the way that people think. It’s really a bridge to change people’s habits. And that it shouldn’t be a shock, it should be a beautiful transition to indulgence that just hits better than what you’re used to. And it should be that once you make that transition and you go back you’ll realize that, holy crap, all you could taste is sugar. And that there’s a whole world out there that’s just delicious without having to be sugar bombs. I mean, this rocked the entire industry.

How have unstable cocoa costs affected chocolate prices?