I think I just found the newest chocolate to feature in a Portland Hafu (Dream Eater) book for my chocolate-loving heroine, Koi to discover.
I’ve made it a point to try to buy fair trade or organic chocolate since I went to Nicaragua and picked coffee beans on a collective back in college. The barefoot kids scampering up and down the mountains picking twice as big a bushel as I could taught me a sober lesson about life and what you have to do to survive.
Alot of the same issues with coffee exist with chocolate.
I just came across this Dutch brand of chocolate that has an office in Portland OR, so you know I had to buy it. Portland, chocolate, and slave free!
From their website:
Tony is the English equivalent of the Dutch name Teun, and Teun van de Keuken is our founder. Teun is a Dutch TV journalist who kicked off the crusade against (child) slavery within the chocolate industry on the consumer report TV show Keuringsdienst van Waarde. Teun was shocked when he read that slavery still existed in the cocoa sector. He tried to discuss the problem with the large chocolate makers, but they completely ignored him. He stepped up and took action. Teun decided to lead by example and make 5,000 Fairtrade chocolate bars himself. Tony’s Chocolonely was born.
And because he felt like he was the only guy in the chocolate industry that cared about eradicating slavery from the industry, he named his chocolate “Chocolonely”. Get it? The chocolate industry was a lonely place for 100% slave free crusaders!
The problem is…I gave away my bar to my daughter who is on a school trip to New York, so I don’t actually know if its good or not. But let’s face it, as long as it doesn’t taste like Hershey’s I’m going to love it.
You just gotta watch out for cadmium and lead if you eat as much as I do. Sadly, other Oregon chocolateries I love, Dagoba and Moonstruck, were both on this list.
What I Should Have Said 