ORGANICS - How we love thee? Let me count the ways.
It’s Organic Week here in Aotearoa, and we’ve been thinking about why we love organics so much and made the choice, fifteen years ago, that every single Bennetto product would be certified organic. Not most of them. Not the flagship ones. Just all of them. The short answer is that we like things clean and simple… no fluff and just what’s needed. The longer answer takes us back to the cocoa farms.
Let’s take a moment to think about growers. Conventional cocoa is one of the most chemically intensive crops in the world. Synthetic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are routinely applied by hand, often without protective equipment, often by people who can’t read the warning labels. When we visited our partner cooperatives in the Dominican Republic and Peru, we met farmers who had chosen organic because they wanted to grow food they could feed their own children. That stuck with us.
Our pesticides policy commits us to sourcing only from farms that prohibit synthetic chemical inputs. In other words, we are not that comfortable asking someone else to handle something we wouldn’t handle ourselves.
And what about the forests? Most of our cocoa grows under shade, alongside banana, citrus, hardwood, and native species. This is agroforestry, and it’s the way cocoa has been grown for centuries, before industrial monoculture turned up. Our agroforestry and deforestation policies are built around protecting and expanding this approach. Organic certification keeps the system honest because you can’t dump synthetic fertiliser onto a forest floor and call it a forest for long.
The cooperatives we source from in Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Madagascar is doing this work every day. The trees hold the soil. The soil holds the water. The system holds itself together.
And the chocolate? Organic farming means our cocoa is grown without synthetic residues, and our sugar, vanilla, and plant-based products meet the same standard. We think you can taste it, but more than that, we think you should be able to trust it. A square of dark chocolate is a small thing, but it’s a small thing you put inside your body, often the last thing at night, or even as a reward. It should be clean. It should be kind. It should be grown by people who were paid properly to grow it, on land that will still be growing it in fifty years. A standard, not a feature. Being organic is the floor we built the company on, alongside Fairtrade certification across every origin, our Living Wage commitments, and our path through B Corp recertification.
We’ve never made a non-organic product, and we never will.
Happy Organic Week. Thanks for choosing organic chocolate.
