Chocolate paste with and without palm oil, why?

Fair trade, organic and palm oil free: behold the new hazelnut chocolate paste. This is us responding to the rising demand for products without palm oil. Faced with the complex question of sustainable palm oil, consumers often prefer to be on the safe side and refrain from buying palm oil altogether.

We will, however, continue to offer our ‘regular’ hazelnut chocolate paste as well. Which brings us to the one million dollar question: why sell chocolate paste containing palm oil, as the disastrous ecological impact of its large scale plantations can no longer be ignored?

Oxfam Fair Trade buys its palm oil from sustainable cooperatives. Moreover, our products contain considerably small amounts of palm oil (e.g. 2.35 % in dark chocolate paste and 4 % in hazelnut paste).We buy the palm oil for our chocolate paste from Serendipalm, a cooperative in Ghana which is organic as well as fair trade certified. The organisation consists of various small scale farmers.

Palm trees are native to Ghana and they can be farmed organically on the Serendipalm fields, amidst the various indigenous tree species. That means that here there is none of the monoculture, logging or burning that palm oil farming is generally associated with. Nor any of the ecological atrocities like the endangered orangutans in Borneo.

In this way all chocolate lovers, whether or not they wish to refrain from buying palm oil, can now indulge in the guilt-free pleasure of the Oxfam Fair Trade assortment.