It’s World Chocolate Day! We don’t need an excuse to celebrate one of our favorite ice cream ingredients, but since it’s on the calendar, let’s dig in! Our ingredients are one of the most important parts of how we do business. After all, no ingredients = no ice cream. And ever since the very beginning, our co-founders, Ben and Jerry, have structured the business around what we call linked prosperity. It’s the idea that if we’re doing well, all the people who contribute to the business should do well, too. In practice, that means that we make sure that everyone who has a hand in making our ice cream — from the cocoa farmers to the manufacturing team — gets their fair share of the profits. Here are 3 ways that our cocoa is making a big, positive impact:
We take fairness seriously around here, and we’re proud to partner with Fairtrade to source our cocoa, vanilla, sugar, coffee, and bananas. In 2005, we became the first ice cream company in the world to use Fairtrade Certified ingredients. Today, every Ben & Jerry’s flavor is Fairtrade Certified in every country where you can find us. Fairtrade makes sure that the farmers and farmworkers who work hard to harvest our ingredients earn a fair price. That's great news for them, their families, and their communities.
On top of the fair price that all the farmers we work with receive through Fairtrade, we’ve taken it a step further for cocoa farmers specifically. Cocoa farming is uniquely difficult — fluctuations in the global cocoa market, changing rainfall patterns, and increasing deforestation all have an outsized impact on cocoa production. Cocoa farmers in West Africa — which grows 70% of the world’s cocoa — make an average of $0.78 per day, and extreme poverty has led to widespread human rights issues such as forced labor and child labor. We want to be a part of the solution. So we developed our Living Income Accelerator program, which works with cocoa co-operatives and farming communities with the aim of promoting living incomes and dignified livelihoods for farmers.
There’s no question about it: chocolate makes people happy! Most of our flavors contain chocolate — either in the rich ice cream mix, decadent fudgy swirls, or those gotta-have-em fudge chunks. Share a scoop of Chocolate Fudge Brownie or Half Baked with someone special today and celebrate the joy of chocolate!
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