"It doesn’t make sense for chocolate bars to be divided into equal-sized chunks when there is so much inequality in the chocolate industry! The unequally-sized chunks of our 6.35 oz bars are a palatable way of reminding Choco Fans and Serious Friends that the profits in the chocolate industry are unequally divided.

And in case you haven’t noticed, the bottom of our bars depicts the West African coastline. The chunks just above it represent the Gulf of Guinea. From left to right, you have Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Benin (terribly politically incorrect, we know, but we had to combine them to create enough space for a hazelnut), Nigeria and part of Cameroon."

From https://us.tonyschocolonely.com/pages/faqs

    • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      Fait point, but it’s a statement about the industry as a whole, not their own production. Even if they were to distribute profits evenly over the entire production chain of their products (which I agree they probably don’t), the industry as a whole would still have this problem.

    • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      They literally do, and their chocolate is a little more expensive because of it

      But they’re not Hershey or Cadbury (whoever owns them, forget the name rn), or even close to them in size, so they can’t just fix the industry all on their own

      • pixelscript@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        The “lonely” part of the name comes from how they’re the only player in the industry trying to do what they do.

  • rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    I’m gonna be real here when I saw one of these bars for the first time I just assumed they were assholes and didn’t look any further into why the bar wasn’t cut in a usable way.

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    It doesn’t make any sense to do this as a metaphor. Chocolate is typically divided into evenly sized chunks for measurement purposes, regardless of the evil practices of the chocolate industry.

    The metaphor is asinine the explanation is confusing and it’s lost on almost everybody who buys this.

    I have had this brand of chocolate before and it is quite good however.

    • pixelscript@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      I have never been in or adjacent to a situation where I had to measure chocolate packaged and sold to be eaten as-is in a recipe by squares broken off of a bar, at the demarcations pre-scored into the bar. If I needed that much control I’d grate it or use a chocolate that came pre-granulated, like baking kisses.

      For chocolate bars meant to be eaten, the score lines are very much for sharability first. Any use of them for culinary measurement is at best a peripheral feature.

      This probably doesn’t hold true for baking chocolate. But Tony’s isn’t baking chocolate.

      • mechoman444@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        3 months ago

        I didn’t say it was for cooking. I said measurement. That can be applied to consumption as well as in a cooking capacity.

    • freddydunningkruger@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      I don’t know, man. Sounds like the guy at least TRIED to do something more than most people. Granted, it doesn’t compare to a life spent delivering clever piss-take commentary to Lemmy, but not everyone can be so blessed.

      Also, speaking of asinine, measurement purposes? If they were selling unsweetened cocao bars for baking, you would have had a point.

      I’d say most people get frustrated and think WTF did they make this chocolate bar a pain in my ass? Then maybe they notice the story on the inside of the wrapper and read it?

  • e$tGyr#J2pqM8v@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    Some info, that’s interesting and helps balance this blatant advertisement. Tony’s was started by Dutch television maker Teun van der Keuken. He worked on a program that exposes products for their production methods and false marketing and so on. They stumbled onto the slavery that’s part of the cacao industry. He asked to be arrested for eating chocolate, and in doing so enabling slave labor, but he wasn’t. He started out Tony’s Chocolonely to attempt to change the chocolate industry. He’s not part of the company anymore. He has concluded the mission has failed, and is very critical of his former company, saying they’ve lost sight of the aim: slave-free chocolate.

      • e$tGyr#J2pqM8v@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        This article is from 2015. By then it’s been 10 years since the company started, and he already left it. In the article he explains that still only 25% of the cacao used in Tony’s Chocolonely is guaranteed slave-free, let alone that they’ve had any significant impact on the industry at large. He says the situation of slave labor in cacao industry has only worsened. Tony’s has changed the message on their product “100% slave free” (which was false advertising) to something like “working together towards slave-free chocolate”, which he concludes to be meaningless marketing. It’s rather bizarre that such a message is allowed on a product that contains cacao from slave-labor…

  • HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I swear to god I need a rolling my eyes emoji for the shit I see on Lemmy sometimes.

    Today’s post is…
    *Shuffles cards.
    Inequality… Chocolate… so you can feel depressed about the world while you are eating chocolate.

    (no offense to OP, maybe I’m just an old man who doesn’t get it)

    • BaldManGoomba@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      The thing is you live in what is called the imperial core if you are a western nation citizen and especially if you are an American citizen. You get what you want for dirt cheap prices(even if you think it is expensive). Turns out many things you own or get is at the expense of other people who still live in dirt houses or just don’t know where their next meal will come from or just in general an exploited people who isn’t getting a sustainable compensation for their work. You get chocolate, an electric car, or diamonds at dirt cheap prices from the labor of people who don’t even know what chocolate tastes like. You get chocolate because you enjoy chocolate. Chocolate is cheap because you demand it to be so you can have a little treat. You winge at learning about something while eating chocolate. We are sitting comfortable eating chocolate while you cry about learning about inequalities. You are asked to think about inequality about your little treat. It isn’t about chocolate at all. Just take some time to consider your little treat is making someone millions while the person’s hands who made it is hungry and will die at 40 because of the conditions they live in.

      No we don’t expect you to completely stop eating chocolate. No we don’t expect you to change the world. We ask you to just think about other people for a moment while you take a break. I know it is hard since most people are being exploited in a different way here in the west and we have our own lives but at least we have so much food here that we won’t go hungry with programs to help funded by how rich we are. While people who made our little treat dedicate some farm land for our tasty morsel when they are hungry themselves. Never to even know that there hands create a delicious thing we can buy for less than 20 minutes of our labor in America

        • BaldManGoomba@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          Tell me you don’t think about anything outside your 60 mile radius of your house. You really grasp complex thought and how things are interconnected

    • SharkEatingBreakfast@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      Hey. I understand that maybe you’re unaware of the nuance behind this. Almost all massive producers of chocolate rely of human exploitation and slavery to get their chocolate. Many “workers” are also young children. People need to know this.

      I know that it seems like people might just be out to “spoil the fun”, but the more you know about a product and how it is produced, you can make decisions about your consumption.

      I’ve made decisions like purchasing the majority of my clothing secondhand, avoiding N×stlè products, cutting much of my meat consumption, etc. because I’m faced with the reality that my choices affect the lives around me, even if I do not see the impact directly.

      It’s upsetting to hear about the reality of things like this, but it’s very very important to be informed. I do not want to simply consume a product if I know that it is actively harming lives and/or contributing to human suffering. If that means avoiding certain chocolate bars, so be it. I hope that someone would do the same for me, too, if I were in such a position.

  • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    Absolutely disgusting chocolate in my opinion. Chalky and bland. It’s nice that they claim to be about equality, but the product itself just isn’t to my taste. And yes, the dumb way they make these bars also really puts me off.

    I just want a normal, boring bar that tastes nice. And this is not the brand for me.

    • Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      Treat yourself one time. The quality of the chocolate is so much better than the garbage shoveled out by Hersheys.

      My spouse and I discovered their chocolate by chance. It’s now our go-to because of their business practices and their quality.

    • JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      Sure, gram for gram, Tony’s has 34% more lead than California would like, but their chocolate is still sold in the state.

      To add to what @Maalus@lemmy.world pointed out, the Mast bar is 70g for $8, while Tony’s bar is 180g for $6.

      Gram for gram, Mast is more than triple the price.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      There is absolutely no difference in price between the two - i.e. a “fancy” one like this and a regular one. Both will most likely be made by machining a block of graphite and using EDM to make the actual mold. The difference in machining time wouldn’t cost more than $200 or so

        • Do you also find it hilarious to use the word techno whenever somebody mentions EDM?

          One time this dude who is maybe a little autistic, possibly very autistic, made this super detailed post about all the different genres of electronic dance music. If you know anything about it, you know there’s some hyper-specific sub genres out there, and this dude took the time to not only list them all out, but verbally describe what made a piece of music fit into one genre versus all the others.

          Obviously I replied with something like “Man, I love techno.”