The Northwest Chocolate Festival 2026

Every Halloween, Americans buy 90 million pounds of chocolate bars and candy — but few of us stop to ask where the chocolate actually comes from. Behind the shiny wrappers of your Snickers, Reese's, and M&M's is a supply chain built on the backs of West African laborers, including children who handle chainsaws and machetes, carry hundred-pound sacks, and breathe in herbicide fumes — all so that Big Chocolate (companies like Hershey, Nestlé, and Mars) can rake in billions in profits while paying farmers less than two dollars a day.

These corporations have helped decimate the forests of Ivory Coast and Ghana, exacerbating the same climate disasters we now see playing out worldwide. Meanwhile, Wall Street traders speculate on cocoa futures as an abstraction, and in our grocery stores, we face an unpalatable choice between cheap candy and our conscience.

Cheap chocolate is the fast fashion of the confections industry. But we can drive the change we want to see in the chocolate sector. Join author Birgitte Rasine in exploring the power we didn’t know we had as parents, elders, and professionals as role models for the younger generations of chocolate lovers growing up in a runaway consumer society.