It’s that time of year again, spooky season!

Halloween is one of America’s favorite holidays, and it’s no surprise why. While corn mazes and trick-or-treating are some of our favorite activities, there’s a whole lot more to love. That is, except for the scary truth of what might be behind your chocolate.

The scariest thing about Halloween isn’t the ghosts or goblins..

What makes Halloween so much fun is the spookiness of it all. From nights of frights watching scary movies, to trips to haunted houses to looking back on November 1st at how much candy you ate the night before. The spookiest things about Halloween should be the sweetest, but not all of them are. The scariest thing about Halloween isn’t the hocus pocus or the scary costumes marching down the street, it’s that the chocolate we give to children might be made by children.

So, Halloween candy might be made with child labor?

Unfortunately, yes. This year, the US government-funded NORC report showed that on aggregate at least 1 in 2 children in cocoa growing households in West Africa were performing child labor, and a total 1.56 million children were working under illegal conditions in 2018/19. Those numbers are alarming, especially since about 70% of the world’s cocoa is grown in West Africa alone.

You can probably already guess how this relates to Halloween, but to paint a clearer picture, Voxestimates that 300,000 tons of candy are sold during the Halloween season. That’s six whole Titanics worth Now picture how much of that is chocolate and, more specifically, chocolate sourced in West Africa. We’re no mathematicians, but we can tell it’s a pretty big amount.

What’s the solution?

At Tony’s, we work to end modern slavery and illegal child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa. We use our 5 sourcing principles to address those problems directly, and we encourage other chocolate companies to take them and use them too. Addressing the problems of modern slavery and illegal child labor in the cocoa supply chain isn’t easy, and it’s gonna take a lot of teamwork.

That’s why we made our Halloween Tiny Tony’s! They’re ethically produced and prove that all Halloween chocolate can be made ethically. Together, by making Halloween chocolate more ethically and sharing it with the world, we can make the scariest things about Halloween some of the sweetest once again.

How else can we make Halloween sweeter?

The first step to changing the chocolate industry is awareness. You’ve gotten know that there’s a problem before you can start to solve it, after all. We always encourage our Choco Fans and Serious Friends to share our chocolate and our story, and this Halloween we’re adding another spooktacular way for you to do just that with Halloween Zoom and Microsoft Teams backgrounds! Click here to download these backgrounds.

While our mission is focused on West Africa, we are a B Corp at the end of the day and like to do good in our communities too. This year, Halloween might look a little different, and regardless of how you want to celebrate, we think everyone should have access to safe Halloween fun.