We have much more to do and your continued support is needed now more than ever.
This Mother’s Day, Love Mother Earth
Show you care with good chocolate
There are many ways to show love — with words, actions, flowers, but few gestures say “I care” quite like chocolate! So this Mother’s Day, let’s show Mother Earth that we care about her, her health, her forests, and the people who call her home. We can do that by making better choices when we buy chocolate.
But what exactly is good chocolate? It’s the kind you can enjoy without any trace of guilt. Good chocolate is produced without harming forests, it pays dignified wages to the farmers who grow it, and it ensures no child is exploited in the process. To help you tell the difference between good chocolate and not-so-good chocolate, NWF partners every year with Slavery Free to bring you a list of brands worth your trust — and your taste!
Good Chocolate Keeps Mother Earth’s Forests Standing
Good chocolate is traceable to its origins and it doesn’t drive deforestation. As consumer demand and market regulations, including pending legislation in Europe, raise the bar for ethical and deforestation-free chocolate, a growing number of companies in the cocoa sector have made significant progress in adopting and implementing traceability and monitoring processes across their supply chains. But progress is uneven, and despite the leadership by some companies, major players in the cocoa sector must back their commitments with action.
Traceability is no simple task. A complex network of indirect suppliers, including local traders, middlemen known as coxeurs, and informal cocoa cooperatives, makes tracking cocoa beans extremely difficult. In Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer, a 2022 Trase analysis showed that 65% of the country’s cocoa exports were indirectly sourced. The large number of actors involved in the supply chain makes tracing cacao beans to their origins even harder, and nearly impossible to know with certainty whether they were grown without harming forests. It is challenging, but it can be done!
Of the 49 companies that responded to the Chocolate Scorecard survey, only 8 provided verifiable information that their cacao was produced without deforestation. The eight companies are Bennetto, Chocolatemakers, HALBA, Malmö, Original Beans, Ritter Sport, Tony’s Chocolonely, and Whittaker’s. These eight prove it can be done. The others will need to catch up.
The 7th Edition Chocolate Scorecard is here, check it out!
If you’ve been hungry to know which chocolate brands deserve a spot in your shopping cart, we have some exciting news. This year, in addition to the classic Good Egg, Bad Egg, and Gender Award for retailers and companies, Slavery Free has introduced two new categories: the Retail Stayers Award, recognizing consistent participation and transparency by retailers across successive editions, and the Farmer Health Award, highlighting the progress and commitment made by companies to support farmers’ health.
Drumroll, please…here are the 2026 Chocolate Scorecard winners:
Good Egg Large Company
The Swiss company HALBA is the first large company in Scorecard history to score green in every category — paying farmers a living-income premium, mapping every farm in its supply chain, and running agroforestry projects across multiple countries.
Good Egg Small Company
Original Beans, returning to the podium for the second year in a row, and Swiss retailer Coop, two brands proving that doing good and tasting great are not mutually exclusive
(NEW) Farmer Health Award
The Hershey Company becomes the first-ever Farmer Health Award winner, recognized for its health-insurance program for farmers in Ghana.
Gender Award
Tony’s Chocolonely takes home the Gender Award for its work tackling gender inequality in their cocoa supply chain, since women farmers in cocoa often earn less than male farmers.
(NEW) Retail Stayers Award
This new Award honors eight retailers who have submitted to scrutiny and engaged with uncomfortable findings year after year since the Scorecard began. They don’t always score well. But that’s precisely the point.
Ahold Delhaize, Aldi Nord, ALDI SOUTH Group, Carrefour, Coop, MIGROS, Systeme U and Woolworths.
Bad Eggs
Mondelēz International, the second-largest chocolate company in the world that own brands like Dairy Milk, Creme Egg, Toblerone and Milka declined to participate in the Chocolate Scorecard. They refused to answer questions about child labor, deforestation, and whether the farmers growing their cocoa earn enough to live on.
Starbucks earns the Bad Egg this year for its continued refusal to engage with the Scorecard. The company declined to answer any questions about the ethics and sustainability of its cocoa supply chain, a troubling lack of transparency from one of the world’s most recognizable brands.
More companies are answering the hard questions
Slavery Free and a coalition of more than 30 NGOs, academic institutions, and civil-society partners have spent seven years holding companies and brands in the chocolate market accountable — pushing them to be transparent about the chocolate they put on our shelves. When the Chocolate Scorecard launched, only a small group of companies and retailers were willing to publicly answer hard questions about child labor, farmer income, deforestation, and pesticide use. This year, 80 companies and retailers were invited to participate and 49 accepted, a 61% overall rate. Large and medium companies showed strong engagement at 79%.
But the bigger story is this: the answers are getting better. Eight of the 49 participating companies scored well across every category, and they’re no longer just small craft chocolate makers. Medium and large companies are proving that scale and good practice can go hand in hand.
US Retailers: No Show, No Accountability
No US retailers participated in this year’s Scorecard, and that’s a problem for American consumers who want to know whether their supermarkets are committed to ethical and sustainable chocolate. It’s time for US consumers to demand transparency that protects our climate, our forests, and the farmers who grow the cacao we all love.
So keep informed, love your Mother Earth, and eat good chocolate.
