At present 50% of the company’s chocolates in Canada came from the U.S., and the rest from Europe.
“We are able to source 100% from Europe,” Lechner told Reuters.
Lindt, whose products include Lindor chocolate balls, has already built up inventories in Canada from the U.S. to give it time to change its supply chain, which it expects to complete by the middle of the year.
Chief Financial Officer Martin Hug said it would be slightly more expensive to transport chocolate to Canada from Europe but it would cost less than if tariffs were imposed.
I would love to see more companies move in this direction. It’s not perfect, but at least they are trying, and I think that’s great.
Oh, i was referring to something I noticed recently: There seems to be a growing movement asking for “decolonization” of chocolate, to bring more of the profit from chocolate sales into the countries where caco grows.
I think it raises an interesting ethical question when it comes to a product in which the key ingredients don’t all come from the same place.
On the one side, I totally agree that cacao producers have historically been abused by European chocolate companies, and they should rightfully collect more benefits from this incredibly nice product! Some of these countries even started to block export of un-finished cacao products.
However, many types of chocolate cannot be made with cacao alone, and depend on other ingredients coming from other areas of the world. If every area acts the same way, then it becomes impossible to create “assemblage” products like milk chocolate… How should these situations be handles ethically?
ideally you would produce them where the most valuable material is, leading to the development of that location, leading to a reduction of margin, leading to a change to another of the involved locations