Halloween Chocolate

Tony’s Chocolonely Hopes to Change Your Halloween Candy

Whether you’re an Ichabod Crane person (Sleepy Hollow for the win), the Dracula/Frankenstein/Mummy genres are more your thing, or you’re into the really scary stuff, Halloween tends to be a super fun time of the year for many of us.

Perfectly situated amidst the beautiful Fall, with temperatures cooling (sometimes a little too much), gorgeous autumn scenery surrounding us, and so, so much pumpkin… it’s hard not to love this time of year.

And yes, that of course includes the big day on October 31st, when kids of all ages dress up like their favorite character du jour, and we all hope for more treats than trickery.

Chocolate, but of course, tends to play a crucial role in the treat portion of our Halloween endeavors.

Unfortunately, “the dark side of chocolate” isn’t a fun, scary play on words from some fright fest; instead, it’s the fact that the chocolate you give out to trick-or-treating kids holds a high probability of originating from child, or even child slave, labor.

Yes, when it comes to Halloween, Big Chocolate Tells No Tales.

We’ve written extensively on the subject here in Chocolate Connoisseur Magazine (see our June ’19 issue for our most recent coverage), and over the summer, The Washington Post hit the chocolate world hard with their latest expose on big chocolate’s child labor situation as well (which we discuss in-depth in the aforementioned June ’19 issue).

It seems crazy to think that here in the 21st century we, as a human race, can’t seem to get our act together when it comes to things as fundamental as preventing child labor and slavery. Dena White, US Marketing Manager for Tony’s Chocolonely, chimes in on this as well —

“Isn’t it strange that we hand out chocolate to children that could be made by children? At Tony’s, we think it’s completely unacceptable that cocoa farmers are being exploited and not paid fairly for their cocoa. Extreme poverty is the root cause of illegal child labor and modern slavery on cocoa farms in West Africa. That needs to stop.”

Dena then elaborates further on Tony’s Halloween chocolate mission —

“When we say we’re ‘crazy about chocolate, serious about people’, we mean it. That’s why we’re launching Tiny Tony’s for Halloween. Now you can share treats that are made fairly with without forced labor while also sharing our story. That helps us move one step closer to a future where all chocolate worldwide is 100 percent slave free.”

So what’s in each bag of these festive looking treats? Here’s the lowdown per Tony’s —

• 27 individually-wrapped chocolate bites in bright orange packaging
• Melt in your mouth 32% milk chocolate freckled with crunchy caramel and flakey sea salt
• Button-shaped chocolates with a pattern of a broken chain, symbolizing the disruption in the cocoa industry

Limited Halloween Chocolate Options

If you’re looking to make fun Halloween treats at home, more options thankfully exist, like the healthy Halloween treats you can find over at Active Kids.

When it comes to treats for trick-or-treaters, however, the healthy (and ethical) field narrows considerably. Indeed, you’ll find very, very few options. An abundance of the sugary junk rules the Halloween roost, with very little presence of any higher quality sweets.

With sites like Oriental Trading that serve up bags of every cheap brand of Halloween chocolate and candy you’ve probably ever heard of, Tony’s hopes to fill a void that’s existed for a long, long time, especially if they can gradually grab a larger market share over time.

Dena White also notes —

“Halloween is such a fun moment for sharing chocolate, which is one of our favorite things to do. So, we picked our best-selling flavor (which just so happens to come in an orange wrapper) and made them bite-sized.”

For a look at all the chocolate options out there for the holiday, see our full Halloween chocolate article from an earlier issue, where we cover everything from big chocolate to the good stuff, include some fun facts for the season, and of course offer up all the options for slave free chocolate for Halloween.

Yes, there are of course other chocolate options out there, but Tony’s new offering here in 2019 is the first of its kind to directly compete with big chocolate on what we hand out to trick or treaters. Here’s to that trend continuing, and expanding, in the years ahead!