The Ethics of Sustainable Cocoa

July 22, 2024

Often when discussing the ethics of sustainability, there are more questions than there are answers. Technical Editor Clay Gordon gets to the bottom of what ethical really means for cocoa professionals

My first article as Technical Editor of IC Magazine appeared in the June/July 2021 issue. The topic was “Communicating Sustainability.” I had just participated in a panel discussion at the recent virtual CHOCOA conference where Denise Dahlhoff of The Conference Board shared some of the results of a study they did examining what consumers around the world thought “sustainable” meant.

The TL;DR – Too Long, Didn’t Read – of that report (“How Consumers Define Sustainability”), is that consumers in different parts of the world hold to different ideas of what sustainability means. In Europe, for example, there is a tendency to equate sustainability with social justice. In the United States, however, consumers tend to think about sustainability in terms of recycling. One finding to take away from the research is the importance of understanding what your audience thinks when crafting messaging. If you’re in the US and you deliver marketing messages in Europe about recycling the audience will not respond the same way Americans do.

Within the confectionery industry it seems that every time you pick up a “sustainability” report (or sourcing, transparency, or “fair” report, there is a slightly – and often very subtly – different presentation of what sustainability means. One potential consequence of the lack of consensus around the meaning and use of terms like sustainability is that it makes greenwashing easier – sustainability can mean whatever the report author says it does, proceeding accordingly.

Mild Spoiler Alert: From the above three paragraphs you might be getting the impression that this article is going to wade into philosophical depths rather than focusing on reporting what companies are reporting their sustainability policies and successes are.

You are right in coming to that conclusion. That’s because it’s always a good idea when entering into discussions like this to agree on terms. Sustainability is a part of many ethical frameworks. But ethics and sustainability are not synonymous.

For this article, I am using the following definition of sustainable/sustainability: “To be sustainable means ‘Meeting our current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs, taking into account environmental, economic, and social resources, and market and other factors.’”

It is critical to recognize that by adopting this definition I have created a subjective goal to strive for. This makes it possible for me to create a suite of objective criteria to measure progress (or lack thereof), toward the end and intermediate goals. If I can get every reader of this article to agree to adopt this definition, then we have collectively agreed to a subjective goal and we can work together to develop objective criteria against which to measure progress.

Read the full feature in our magazine.