10 years of Tony's blog #1: ten years of Tony's. Reason for a party?

It's almost our birthday. Because in November 2005 the first Tony's Chocolonely bar came onto the market. Milk chocolate in an alarming red packaging. Things are seriously wrong in the chocolate industry.

Do you remember how it started? Well, journalist Teun van de Keuken raises the alarm when he goes to cocoa plantations in West Africa for the Inspection Service of Value and sees child slaves at work there. He calls all the major chocolate companies but no one answers him. Furious, he starts his lonely fight for slave-free chocolate. Teun decides to set a good example and has 5,000 Fairtrade chocolate bars made. Tony's Chocolonely is a fact. And it was an immediate success.

We have now been ten years on the road to 100% slave-free chocolate. With incredibly delicious chocolate we show that chocolate can be made differently. We have been supported, encouraged, challenged and eaten. We have learned how difficult it is to change an industry. We have grown enormously and have achieved first results (see Tony's timeline). Reason for a party. But we remain critical and the bar is rising again, because after ten years we are not there yet...

Currently, slaves still work on the cocoa plantations in West Africa. Many of them are children. This is really not normal. This year the Cocoa Barometer and the Tulane research. This maps out the worst forms of child labor in the chocolate industry and critically monitors what chocolate companies are doing about this. As early as 2001, major chocolate companies pledged to completely eradicate the worst forms of child labor. What now turns out: in 2015 there are even more children working under illegal and dangerous conditions on the cocoa plantations than ever before, more than 2 million! How is this possible? Well, mainly because the root causes are still not resolved: low prices for cocoa farmers, lack of knowledge, weak organization of farmers, poor infrastructure and awareness. And all the separate initiatives to tackle these problems do not add up.

It almost makes you despondent. But we are not at all, we are full of ambition and that is bigger than our own alarming bar. We will not rest until 100% slave-free chocolate is normal. But we can't do it alone. In the coming blogs we will take you through our challenges, our future plans and ask you for your help. Because alone we make our chocolate slave-free, but together we make all chocolate 100% slave-free .

We will celebrate our FAIR anniversary on November 19, where we will have a party with you. Because we have fun in what we do, keep laughing and are therefore full of energy to move mountains of chocolate.