Crazy About Chocolate, Serious About People | Henk Jan Beltman, Tony's Chocolonely | OnBrand '16

I'm here to talk about tones and I don't like titles I hate the fact of actually being called the boss so my title is chief chocolate officer and it will make people smile if I'm on the kindergarten playground and picking up Benton T's from school and other kids are coming up to me saying are you the boss of chocolate small kids like that women like that to guys don't understand that but I'm not the boss I want to be the fundament I want to be the fundamental which people can flourish and which people can willing to take more risks than anywhere else and they can make mistakes because I think if you make a mistake you learn and if you learn and you're gonna give the company everything that you have so I want to want to stretch people to the boundaries of their abilities and yes it's okay to make a mistake once if you make the same mistake twice then you have to start looking for a new job so it is all about raising people in their skills and their possibilities what they can do and I like it that I'm the fundament chief chakras officer instead of being the boss since there are a lot of guys in the room I will tell you how girls shop if girls go to a supermarket then they buy everything that's on their list and they get there cleaning their foods and their personal homecare materials and then finally the whole list is checked and everything is bought then they get to the cashier and just before they go to the cashier they look at chocolate just before the cashier desktop so they're gonna park the chart walk back make a quick choice go back put it on top of all the other groceries and then you have to put your your grocery shopping on the conveyor belt to the cashier right and just before the conveyor belt that's this little chocolate shelf girls know that so we're gonna put the chocolate on the chocolate shelf and all groceries going we go very well and eggs are okay to be on the chocolate shelf as well and then they close off with chocolate and with the eggs and then by the time they pay they leave chocolate is on top of the groceries in the bag and whether you're walking biking or by car to stoplights and then you look at your grossing think what the heck one bite so you open up call the rapper they take one bite of chocolate a good chocolate huh my mouth is already watering good chocolate has his shine and has a really crisp snap so let's see whether this works you open your mouth little piece of chocolate goes inside starts melting on your tongue and I do love a girl from girlfriend who is very capable of giving a good friends kiss but actually chocolate is competing with us and that's what chocolate is all about right it's it's that present that you receive or you want to give to somebody else that's what chocolate is and it makes you happy yeah and if you look at chocolate it's being made of of cocoa and cocoa isn't one of the main ingredients of chocolate apart from cocoa there's milk powder and there's sugar inside but actually cocoa is the main ingredient and cocoa grows around the equator so it grows in Middle America in Southeast Asia but the main of the crop 70% comes from western Africa those countries so it's Ghana Ivory Coast cocoa Benin Nigeria Cameroon those countries in western Africa produce around 70 percent of the annual production of cocoa and that's being sold by 2 million farmers to let's say 8 I'm not sure whether they're here maybe 9 if we consider ourselves a big company but 8 companies are buy it you have three business-to-business suppliers of couverture and curvature is actually a woman's dream it's a truckload 40,000 liters of liquid chocolate you can actually swim in what they sell and it's a DM or Cargill Barry Callebaut and econ 3 companies who are huge but they don't have any consumer-facing and on the other hand you have brands like Mars Nestle Mondelez which is the mother company of milk and curd or she and my five huge consumer packaging companies and of course storage those eight or nine companies they consume more than 100 percent of the annual production of cocoa and it's not completely fair to actually add up these with these but roughly you can say that all cocoa beans being worldwide produced goes through the hands of one of those eight companies those companies are in the middle and then it's you and me on the left side right side of the screen consuming chocolate every day and let's make an agreement if you don't consume chocolate every day please start with it from today the first bar is in the back and tomorrow this the task is up to you you have to buy one because chocolate is a gift it's a gift for yourself or somebody else but actually we have to enjoy that so what you see is an hourglass right yep on one hand you have billions of farmer millions of farmers eight big companies and then you have billions of consumers and that hourglass is actually being controlled by the middle so the industry is in control of what's going on in the failure chain of chocolate of cocoa and the farmer receives only 12 cents for the cocoa content inside of a milk chocolate bar like this which is being sold for two euros 50 or 265 even in that stores and if you realize that there's so little money going to the beginning of the value chain the farmer then you know that there's price pressure on the value chain how does that work normally we sell chocolate to the supermarket or the supermarkets s yeah one more at a lower price that's always the case so you start negotiating with the supermarket sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and the things that you've lost in that conversation you turn around and you go to the many factor and say well okay I want you to provide us with chocolates a little bit cheaper that's what normally normal companies do because they have an aim on gross margin and that aim at gross margin has to stay up and then that manufacturer turns to the other manufacturer and the other manufacturer turns to the provider of cocoa beans in the provider of cocoa beans turns to the farmer and the farmer turns to the tree and the only one in the chain was not giving in is the tree you cannot negotiate with a three so to say it nicely if there's price pressure in any value chain then the farmer is fucked because at the beginning of the value chain they have anybody to turn to and that's why they end up with only 12 cents we paid 25% more to the farmer that's what Tony's does it's not something to be proud of but it makes that you get a good product good quality Co Co Co B and you provide him with the money that he needs to be actually at the at level that he can send his own kids to school and the only reason why we do that is if you want to be proud of the product you sell because if you can and cannot be proud of the product that you sell the marketing is baloney and if you mark the product that you're really proud of the sell then you can really market it but you have to be sure that your pride is in the product that you sell and for that reason we have to pay more to the cocoa farmer to eradicate all forms of modern slavery for every chain of cocoa today more than 35 million people are working and safe circumstances not only in cocoa that's in apparel that's in cotton that's in tobacco so fishery is mining it's insects if you add those numbers up then more numbers today are working more people working in an unsafe circumstances today than ever before in time and then we talk about black Petes sort a bit I think we have other issues there's got to be to solve right we have to be sure the weekend will be proud of the cigarettes that we smoke the jeans that we wear the chocolate that we eat every day and for that we want to eradicate modern slavery and modern slavery is just a law but if you want to change and we marketeers know that change doesn't come from the brain it comes from the gut you have to have a feeling in the gut that something has to change in it if you hit somebody in the gut then they will change if you hit somebody in the head then they will pass out so it's not here it's here change is here in the belly and the definition talks to the brain and therefore I brought a little fill him up he'll come to he did you eat down what you see here is the fact that the kids are real it's not some kind of a marketing trick that we're talking about sorry for the fact that the film was in French and subtitle in Dutch the what he was saying is that kids were forced to work on a plantation they were not able to leave the plantation were not able to talk to friends or relatives those kids were sold 11 years of age and you can buy a child from 200 to 300 euros and then they are your property like a tool and that's not something that happened 100 years ago this happened five years ago with these kids and come call her mom he came to Holland and actually testified in court but if you see that the guys are not stupid they're not capable of writing so they miss all basic skills they don't have relatives because that's one of the reasons that you get sold and shipped to a certain area where you can work on the cocoa field trafficked kids and if you have seen that and then you imagine me going back to I'm Sylvain to Benton teach to the playground to pick up the kids and then another kid is coming to me up to me they say are you the boss of chocolate then you realize in the gut that something has to change right in the year 2001 senator Harkin and Senator angle came together in the US state Senate and they draw up the Harkin angle protocol now how can an angle protocol is quite straightforward protocol word says says within ten years starting in the year 2001 all big players in the industry of chocolate have to take their responsibility series and the management team of those companies on personal note and on behalf of the company they work for have to eradicate all worst forms of child labor because that's how we call it worst form of child labor we call it slavery but it's the same thing have to be eradicated from the value chain of cocoa they are all signed it's a pretty straightforward document five pages of text and five pages of signatures of all the big players in the cocoa industry by the year 2004 so from the coca the dual relation of the curling's need for a de which is a TV program still running it's more or less the CIA of food what's going on in food and what is the story the marketing is one want us to believe most market is I'm not happy when Tony is showing up and since not everybody has seen one of the episodes so I think there will be somebody who doesn't know and I like telling the story I'm going to tell you the story of vanilla yogurt if you go to a store and you buy vanilla yogurt then you think you buy something in a pack it's yogurt sugar and vanilla that's what you think Fanelli yogurt is right that is the case if you're lucky if you're not lucky then you're actually buying yogurt sugar and vanilla and vanillin is almost the same as vanilla it's tasted almost the same you write it almost the same but it comes from the Christmas tree if you're lucky and if you're not lucky then vanillin comes from the balls testicles of a beaver so in Greenland you find beavers you hunt them you kill them you dry them and you grind the testicles and it tastes exactly like funnier and a Holland it's okay to sell grinded testicles of a beaver in yogas as funny and you can sell this for new yogurt so if you buy the cheapest first you know for new yogurt I would consider trying and learning yourself to eat sour yogurt instead of that or actually spend a little bit more that you're sure that there's no grinded beaver balls inside that's what the current is allowed to do does they dive into a story that marketeers want us to believe and sometimes it's funny and sometimes is mind-blowing in the case of cocoa in the year 2004 nobody wanted to talk to Tony telling them to bark all about and baikal about is the biggest supplier of business-to-business couverture and couverture is the liquid form of chocolate and the hen offices in visa that's right in the middle of Antwerp and Brussels and nobody wanted to talk to him because turns on the coca means trouble and then he thought of the wait for something like seven hours he drove up to fillet face this beautiful town at the end of Lake Geneva with the mountains ending up and then the headquarters of Nestle's right in the middle of that and there was a spokesperson coming out hey mister from the kitchen how are you you want coffee he thought that's that's the surprise people know when how do you know when yeah we got a phone call for baikal about so the competitor called you why yeah they told us that you were coming and we're not going to talk to you and he said if competition starts calling to keep the journalists out then something is really going right so he went back to Holland without anything on tape and he had the feeling well how am I gonna address this issue in a TV show on TV without anybody wanted to say what's going on so then he found a parallel most of you know that you can buy a bike in a formal bar right it's out of the hands of a junkie and the chance that that junkie is both are certified bike mechanic it's rather limited I would say right so if you buy that bike then you're committing a criminal act is called fencing of hailing zazen 807 if you fancy bike knowing that this bike is probably be stolen it's a lot cheaper then you're committing a criminal act if you go to all behind and you are aware of the fact that their slavery going on in the value chain of cocoa today and you're buying a bar you're committing a criminal act turn realize that and he called 911 actually the number in Holland is one one two but for the story it doesn't matter but if you have trouble don't try try 9-1-1 one month - so he calls and he's nice lady picked up the phone and she said what's going on and he said well I'm in chocolate terminal why I've eaten ten bars and she said he'll happens to me to me once a month and he said well I don't have that I have a different problem I am aware of the fact that there's slavery going on in the value chain of cocoa I still attend different bars you have to come and pick me up because I'm in chocolate criminal offense chocolate and by the way everything that you say is gonna be on TV because we are running a TV show called the currency Savannah she didn't say anything anymore sent two coppers he was picked up going to jail then he went to court and in appeal the judge wanted to look at it come call her mom who you just saw in the film came to Holland to testify against stole and a long short story short turn was sent off free due to the fact that the judge found it not likely that the Coco being picked by Conqueror mom ended up in the bar the turn eight there's no causality between eating the chocolate and picking it with slave labor but a judge said yes there is slavery going on and I cannot send everybody to deal so I sent you all free Joan run mats and he had the feeling something is absolutely wrong in the value chain of of cocoa something has to be done and he turned himself and he went to the Chamber of Commerce here in Amsterdam and he launched a company called Toni's chuckle only because it's a lonely battle against the chocolate industry to change it from the inside out for the better and it has to be an international movement and turn was to death she named so he turned his name into Tony Tony chuckle only I bought that company five years ago and I went to Africa and then I realized that this is bigger than just a marketing truck is the marketing trick and selling chocolate over doing something good this really has a purpose who knows Anita Roddick yeah well Anita Roddick is the founder of the body shop and she's my youth example I think she has died far and far too young and what you've done as a business activist to start the body shop to change cosmetics it's absolutely something that I think that is the level that you want to work for right a company with a purpose like that goes under the skin and you're not working for money working for a real thing that really matters you working for a real purpose and when I saw kids and I translated that back to the playground and I'm Sylvain where I pick up my own kids then I realize holy shit whatever water if you think you're too small to have an impact try going to bed with a mosquito in the room and for the guys you don't actually have to sleep with the mosquito it's in the same room but it's different night right you wake up start looking for the bosses don't find it look around and all of a sudden you see it you hit don't see it anymore probably dead you go back to bed to sleep sink you another seven times and then your wife wakes up like all lights go on start looking together both eyes are open now and after the animals stung you five or six or seven times you'll find it you hit it and all sleeping rooms have you call it bedrooms have a white wallpaper and you create a beautiful piece of art of the blood of your own on that wall and then you go back to back it's a different night right we're this little mosquito and that we had a little mosquito who's zooming and sting at times that the big companies want us to shut up and we have to be creative not to be hit over the head too quickly we're crazy about chocolate is serious about people we're not completely happy now we know what we're doing we're making the best tasting chocolate in the world at least that's what we try and you have a beautiful collection of two or one but we have more and we just came out with chocolate with Cola it's nice I can tell you it's for sale in the store so we're passing it to make the nicest and the best-tasting chocolate but we're serious when it comes down to people and it's a bit schizophrenic right being crazy and serious at the same time but we're serious about five kind of people firstly our own team if you have the best team and I slipped through but if you have really good people working for you then it's possible to actually win the commercial raise that we're all in secondly the farmer if you have a long term relationship with the farmer and you take the cocoa traceable in your product and you pay the farmer 25% more then you can be proud of the product relationship that you have with a farmer and it enables the farmer to live a slave free life I think that's really important that's the main thing what we're doing is and still we're gonna put the people first because if you have the right people and you have a purpose then there's no way you're gonna not not win the battle thirdly the consumer because you may get it just consumer absolutely gets what you're talking about but you don't have to talk baloney we don't do any above the line marketing when you invite consumers over because let me tell you one thing because humans are just like normal people nothing to be scared about so we invite them in the office we do have a shop and once you stepped in you're not able to leave the office without having a tour and taking a bar and I could tell you the postman he hates him he gets a bar every day said how in heaven's sake am I gonna get keep slim so he's ringing the bell in handing over the post without stepping over the temple to step inside of the office what is important is that you're real and I think marketing is actually like coming onto a girl in a bar it's the same thing if you have a fake Bologna story then she's gonna run off if you have a real story that she might be interested fourth place is the customer customers like Albert Heijn the postcode lottery but also the real wrinkles which is the fair trade shops and with them we sell chocolate and five fifth places the supplier can be the marketing agency can be the supply of chocolate but we're serious about all five kinds of people and if you're serious about your own value chain they cannot end up with a bar like that all competitions do have market ears and the best they can come up with is a bar like this and if the market is really have the best day in the year they kind of put their own name on each and every piece of chocolate like we're Complete Idiot's we consumers who has their own name on the front door of their house no one yeah some people do who has on every door in the house their own name no one so why does it make sense for a marketeer to put your own logo on each and every piece does it so what we've done we've created a bar that's an equal shares because the story is that we make chocolate out of unequally shared sources the world is unequally shared so the bar is unequally shared product interesting if Tony's is naked on your table then the story is there and yes we took the biggest piece but only once and if you look at the chocolate bar they see that the bottom of the bar is the equator then on the left side of the bar is ivory coast next to that is Ghana next to there's talk of a new next to that is Nigeria and next to that it's come alone so western Africa is on set on the bar so you've probably eaten Ghana or Ivory Coast already and since we're not that good in topography no one actually says that north ogo norbornene is a separate country and it is the middle piece actually consists of two countries Togo and Benin so we had a discussion in the office and the discussion was about what is more important a whole hazelnut in milk chocolate which I like or being correct around the boundaries of the countries and nor in Togo nor even fit as a whole hazelnut the hazelnut one and like a Napoleon we move merge those two countries together and we said never ever kind of tell them people in Togo Albany but it's real you want to bring the purpose to life right so the green one is to blame for the fact that we merge those two countries if you look at what marketing is then you can only work on things that people know and if people are not aware of the fact that their slavery going on in the value chain of cocoa today then you have to tell that story secondly I think that the business has an opportunity and a responsibility to change the world to make the world a nicer place because if you work for money then you don't have a purpose and if you work for a purpose then the mean money had but our middle health it's important because without money you're not gonna end up to your purpose but it is a mean not nothing more than me so most public companies are being traitors and being checked on the mean money and if the goal of a company is a mean then they're mixed up and if the management of a company doesn't know left from right that it's easy to win from them so we want to set an example from being to bar that it is possible to be the fastest growing Chocolate Company to make impact and to actually show the people that they can do the same because we're not gonna change soccer by ourselves we need competition to actually do that and a third is act to inspire we don't want to be this Zodiac boat bumping into the oil tanker of multinational chocolatiers now we want to be the loads such as a guiding boat in the harbour that actually shows the big guys what is the right route to take and how do you end up making your company a company that really works for a purpose and by the time that works then the number of people working and slave circumstances will be eradicated from Cocoa today four hundred sixty thousand people are working illegally in cocoa four hundred and sixty thousand people that the same amount is all people being part of the city of attack imagine that the whole city of ETS the quantity of people are working illegally in Cocoa today and just for us to receive that french-kiss of food I think something has to be changed and there's an obligation for a company and it's obligation that we take very seriously and we want to move the others we want to be the mosquito to change the other companies so that together all these people can live a normal life thank you you