On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger and approximately 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to inform more than 250,000 enslaved Black people of the state that they were free. This announcement came two and a half years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, two months after the end of the Civil War, and more than eighty years after the establishment of a nation whose founding documents declared liberty a self-evident truth.
On this day, we find ourselves in an unusual position as a chocolate business. Sadly, the global chocolate industry was built on and at times still struggles to adequately address the same forces of slavery that Juneteenth commemorates the abolishment of. We believe if we are going to celebrate freedom today, we must also confront the reality that there is still work to be done.
History of Chocolate to Modern Day
The chocolate industry's involvement with slavery begins in 16th century Central America. When Spanish colonizers conquered the Americas, they introduced a legal mechanism by which the Spanish Crown granted colonizers the labor of the indigenous, non-Christian populations. Those people were forced to cultivate cacao and other commodities under conditions of brutal exploitation.
As demand for drinking chocolate grew among European elites throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, production expanded and so did the need for coerced labor. African people, kidnapped and trafficked across the Middle Passage, were forced onto cacao plantations in the Caribbean and West Africa. Britain, which would not officially abolish the slave trade until 1807 and slavery itself until 1833, profited enormously. The cocoa that poured into British ports (alongside tea, sugar, and coffee) was colonial wealth extracted from the Global South.
Today, about 70% of the world's cacao is grown in West Africa, primarily in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. Investigative journalists and human rights organizations have documented for decades the widespread use of forced and child labor on those farms. Both children and adults are enslaved on cacao farms in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. A study found that 23% of surveyed Ghanaian cacao laborers reported having performed work without compensation. Children are trafficked from Mali and Burkina Faso (some of the poorest nations on earth) with promises of wages, housing, and education. They are made to work long hours for little or no pay, sometimes locked in at night to prevent escape.
The estimated number of children in illegal labor conditions in cacao farming ranges from 1.5 to 2.1 million.
Modern slavery in chocolate is driven by systemic forces: widespread poverty in cacao-growing communities, highly volatile pricing, limited farmer bargaining power, and the vast profit margins captured by multinational corporations rather than the people who grow the beans. The average cacao farmer earns as little as $1.20 per day. Meanwhile, the global chocolate industry is projected to be worth more than $200 billion by 2028. Over the last decade, a 62 percent rise in cocoa production in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana was accompanied by a 13 percent increase in hazardous child labor. As production expands, exploitation expands with it.
Chocolate Conglomerates
The industry has known about these issues for over decades. In 2001, major chocolate manufacturers signed the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a public-private pledge to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in cacao by 2005. That deadline passed. New deadlines were set, and those were passed too. America’s biggest chocolate brands, whose products line checkout lanes across the nation, have made repeated promises, and repeatedly failed to keep them.
The companies themselves use words like "unacceptable" and "heartbreaking" to describe the labor practices that grow their cacao. They have published reports, funded initiatives, and partnered with nonprofits. And yet they fought in the nation's highest court to prevent any legal accountability for the mass market status quo.
The 2025 Chocolate Scorecard (an independent annual assessment of the industry) found that only 50% of chocolate is currently traceable to its source. Without traceability, accountability is impossible.
Ethical Sourcing Is Not Luxury
There is a tendency in consumer culture to frame ethical sourcing as a premium. It is seen as something that is available to those who can afford to pay more. Admirable, but optional.
Ethical sourcing that encompasses supply chain traceability, fair wages, elimination of forced and child labor, and transparency at every level, is not a marketing feature for us. It is the minimum condition under which a product can be said not to participate in slavery. The question is not whether one prefers ethically sourced chocolate in the way one prefers dark over milk. The question is whether the pleasure of consuming a product is worth the human cost of its production, a cost borne by people who will never have the pleasure to taste the fruits of their labor.
Progress, however slow and complicated, is possible. Many third party organizations are creating pressure and building frameworks for accountability.
As a small chocolate business, we are proud to say that we prioritize our relationship with our cacao farmers at Conexion Chocolate, and we are committed to full transparency about our sourcing. If you have questions about how our chocolate is made and by whom, please reach out, we welcome the conversation.
Work to be Done
Juneteenth is celebrated this year, as it is every year, as a day of joy, community, and resilience. That joy is hard-earned and worth honoring fully. But Juneteenth is also a call to continued vigilance; a reminder that the formal end of one system of bondage does not automatically dismantle the conditions that made it possible, or prevent new systems from rising in its place.
On this Juneteenth, we invite you to ask questions of us, of every brand you purchase, of the industry as a whole. What is your chocolate made of? Who made it? Under what conditions? Were they paid? Were they free?
These are not rhetorical questions. They have answers. Getting to those answers is worth the work.
Sources and Further Reading
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Food Empowerment Project: Child Labor and Slavery in the Chocolate Industry
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Walk Free: Forced Labour: Chocolate's Hidden Ingredient (2023)
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National Museum of African American History and Culture: The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth
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Oxfam America: Supreme Court Declines to Hold Chocolate Giants Accountable
