Winning with words: Storytelling boosts sustainable profile of chocolate brands at ISM

06 Feb 2020 --- Storytelling is a trending means of portraying brand narrative and values with clients and customers alike. Among the bustle at the sweets and confectionery trade show ISM and ProSweets 2020 hosted in Cologne, Germany, FoodIngredientsFirst spoke with three chocolate-oriented companies who presented different ways of using storytelling as a key marketing tool to boost their sustainability product profiles and captivate the hearts, minds and stomachs of all chocolate lovers.

“Storytelling: Winning with Words” tops Innova Market Insights’ Top Ten Trends for this year. Although ingredient provenance has always been important, consumer interest in discovering the story behind their foods has risen further and is increasingly influencing purchasing decisions, the market researcher highlights. 

Meanwhile, “The Sustain Domain” marks Innova Market Insights’ third-ranking trend for 2020. Consumers increasingly expect companies to invest in sustainability. The market researcher’s data has indicated that 85 percent of, on average, US and UK consumers expect companies to invest in sustainability in 2019, up from 64 percent in 2018.

More than 1,000 words
At the event, Netherlands-based Tony’s Chocolonely showed off its vast range of flavorful thick chocolate bars, from caramel sea salt to 70 percent pure chocolate to dark milk pretzel toffee. However, while event attendees might have been drawn in by the flavor variations, they stayed for the compelling stories told. The company strives to make 100 percent slave-free chocolate the norm in the industry worldwide. “For us, the key in our storytelling is that we are not a chocolate company, but an impact company. In order to make impact, we need to tell the positive and less positive stories around chocolate and the industry,” Nicole Riffert, Marketing Manager DACH at Tony’s Chocolonely, tells FoodIngredientsFirst.

Tony's Chocolonely's slogan "Crazy about chocolate, serious about people" was highlighted at ISM.The anti-slave labor activist company has collaborated with well-known museums, such as the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to establish BITTER Chocolate Stories, a photo exhibition on creating awareness of child labor on cacao plantations in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. The photographs capture the front or back of a dozen minors’ profiles, accompanied by a short written interview of the children’s individual experiences as cacao plantation field-hands.

“The focus is not placed so much on desperation as it is on hope. The way the photographer Joana Choumali portrays the children is different than what you usually see, such as children holding machetes. This exhibition turns away from what you would call ‘poverty porn.’ She did it much differently – very respectfully,” Riffert says.

BITTER Chocolate Stories was inaugurated on February 4 at the Chocolate Museum in Cologne, just across the Rhine river from the event location. “The exhibition holds a big sustainability angle. It’s an ideal setting as it provides an educational platform for visiting school classes and university students – people already interested in chocolate and chocolate making. So you already have an interested audience,” the spokesperson elaborates.

The exhibition’s journey to a German museum marks a first and is set to preside there for seven months.

An American lifestyle
Established in 2017, Treets The Peanuts Company built its product portfolio “all around the peanut” and takes an entirely different approach to emphasizing its Fairtrade chocolate-covered peanut portfolio. Here, the Katjes brand shapes a nostalgic American cowboy narrative, most noticeably with its vibrant orange Dodge Ram seemingly crashing right through the brand’s booth. 

Treets' product portfolio is built "all around the peanut."The booth’s background panel featured a seasoned peanut farmer holding a single peanut in his fingers, as the glow of the evening sun reflects off of his cowboy hat and directs toward the peanut. “Our brand is entirely focused on authentic US-grown peanuts. The cowboy sits here on the field, looks at the peanuts and thinks, ‘God created the peanut but he forgot the chocolate,’” Stephanie Schuth, International Brand Manager, told FoodIngredientsFirst. The company truck was loaded with various chocolate-covered peanuts, spreads, bites and minis.

The heroic imagery Treets transmits goes hand in hand with the brand’s prioritization on Fairtrade ingredients. “We’re looking for a story that matches the product. We use Fairtrade cocoa and coffee. It’s important for us to recognize that consumers are really willing to pay a bit more for a fairtrade,” Schuth says.

“We don’t use any artificial colors or flavors, nor any GMOs so we have very clean products. If we use commodities like palm oil, we always do our best to guarantee that they were harvested in the most sustainable way. Our products use 100 percent segregated palm oil and have Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification, so we can always go to the highest standard to reach sustainable,” adds Joel-Florian Beck, CFO at Treets.

“We thought about bio certification, but it doesn’t make sense to get large amounts of bio-peanuts from China because it doesn’t fit with our storytelling. Chinese and Indian Fairtrade peanuts can be cheaper, but we don’t want to use this image, we want to stay with the high-quality American peanuts,” he highlights.

Telling a story – and providing a solution
Luker Chocolate, a Colombia-based chocolate ingredient supplier and final-product manufacturer, exhibited its wide range of chocolate flavors, ranging from gin and tonic with popping candy to 100 percent cacao chocolate. 

Luker Chocolate has a 113 year old family-owned company history.Speaking with FoodIngredientsFirst, Pedro Thomas, Innovation and Business Growth, embodied Luker Chocolate’s century-long experience and family-owned business positioning as a sixth-generation family member and company employee. He underscored that ethical branding and product sourcing are increasingly important to Centennials and Millennials.

“It’s no longer just about labels – it’s about where a company comes from, what it does and where ingredients are coming from. It’s about using all of those sustainability practices and transmitting it to the final client. People are telling those stories of the small cacao farmers.” 

Luker Chocolate invests in the support and training of Colombian farms. “We have our own farms in Colombia, where we teach small farmers who grow, ferment and sell. So far, we have trained more than 35,000 farmers for more than 60 years.” 

The company’s different clients then invest in various sustainability programs, with the end-consumer’s purchase supporting said programs. Their clients have varying ways of implementing the concept of “sustainability,” says Thomas. 

“Some are really into education, compared to entrepreneurship, for example. Overall, it’s really about finding how the client wants to impact the cacao farming region through its products. This is why we decided to push away from labels a little bit and make tailored, specific projects for clients with different goals. These goals are measurable and the programs last at least two years so we don’t start a program and leave it halfway,” he concludes.

By Anni Schleicher