Re Montezuma’s, they got all legal on us and threatened to take action for writing about them in the context of this post. You can draw your own conclusions about a company that feels the need to do that kind of thing. As we don’t have a legal defence budget, it was easier to remove the paragraph and move onto writing about other companies.

A lot has changed since that Guardian article. Firstly we do now have two bean to bar fine chocolate makers in the UK (Willie Harcourt-Cooze – http://www.williescacao.com and Duffy Sheardown – http://www.redstarchocolate.co.uk).

We also now have a lot of better organic and some of the single origins that have been around are finally trumpeting their certification – like Michel Cluizel’s Los Anconès, which is now ‘organic’. It’s great that their are now some real organic ‘fine’ bars, but they are tiny fraction of the whole market.

At the same time, there is even more generic, industrial, ‘value added’ organic around and I think the core message of this post still applies – the only way you can be truly sure about the ethical quality of a chocolate your eating is to know where the cacao has come from. Generic brands with lots of marketing,romanticism and ‘worthy’ certifications are not the way to go, in my opinion.

this feature is overall worthwhile, but it does smack a little of ‘looking for the negative’

“6. Montezuma’s

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I’m a big Lindt fan, and I’m just wondering if you have an opinion on them, and their practices? My correspondence with Lindt makes me think they are okay: http://www.julietbennett.com/2010/08/18/correction-lindt-didnt-lie-we-can-eat-lindt-chocolate-in-peace/

Slave trade is only happening in the Ivory Coast isn’t it?

The Undercover Economist is an excellent read, by the way.