A Golden Ticket for Chocolate Week 12-18 October

To celebrate Chocolate Week 2009 we’ve teamed up with Divine Chocolate to give away 5000 packs of delicious Fairtrade Chocolate worth over £10,000! All you have to do is place your order at EthicalSuperstore.com between the 12th and the 18th October and we’ll pop the chocolate in your parcel*! *while stocks last

It’s Chocolate Week from 12-18 October and the Academy of Chocolate is giving us even more of an excuse than we already have to celebrate all things chocolate. I’ll be pledging my support in defiance of my nutritionist who has held my sweet tooth captive to an extreme elimination (of everything tasty) diet to combat an irksome illness I’ve had for most of the summer. You know you’ve been on the wagon for a while when the food flashbacks kick in, like remembering one of my childhood dreams which was to be Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – how cool it would be to have my own chocolate factory complete with chocolate rivers, everlasting gobstoppers and glass elevators to fly about in…

As an all American boy, I grew up on Hershey chocolate and M&Ms and I can remember their brainwashing slogan “they melt in your mouth not in your hands” that had my brothers and I testing bag after bag to prove one way or the other. The chocolate I grew up on most Brits can’t stand the taste of, and 7 years after immigrating to England I can now understand why – you guys have been keeping all the yummy chocolate to yourselves!

The history of chocolate starts sometime in the negative calendar years i.e., BC with the early Cocoa, or Cacao crops which were native to Mexico, Central and South America, and originally used both as a beverage and as an ingredient in foods. Over the years, more than 80% of the world’s cocoa production moved to West Africa and along with it the unfortunate development of the slave trade and unfair trade and working conditions imposed on growers. To help combat this problem, in 1994 the world’s first Fairtrade certified product was born as Green & Black’s Maya Gold Chocolate made with cocoa from Belize guaranteeing a fair price to growers.

Then in 1998, Divine Chocolate became the first Fairtrade chocolate brand to have its cocoa growers, Kuapa Kokoo a co-operative of cocoa famers in Ghana, own shares in the company making the chocolate bar. How great is that, the Divine Chocolate farmers get to own the chocolate factory! When I went home to visit my family last Spring, I was pleased to see Divine Chocolate in shops providing Americans a taste of Pa Pa Paa or “the best of the best” as the Kupua Kokoo famers say.

So if you’re going to do one thing in support of Chocolate Week, bite into a Divine Chocolate bar knowing that each one is wrapped in a golden ticket in which you win a heavenly bar of chocolate and Kupua Kokoo famers win a better life for themselves and their families.