Wonka arrived in theatres last week, asking the question no one asked — how did the titular character of Roald Dahl’s most famous book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, become the world’s greatest maker of candy? I’m no more curious about Wonka’s origins than the Joker’s. But I am eager to learn how this prequel explores, or evades, the big issues central to its premise: Where does chocolate come from? Who profits from its production? And who is exploited by it?
This is not my politicization of an innocent children’s story. The trailer makes it out to be a story of class conflict, positioning Wonka as a naive entrepreneur who challenges “the chocolate cartel” — a ruthless capitalistic cabal.
And the story of the chocolates we tuck in our Christmas stockings is much darker than that. The sourcing of cacao beans has a long history of horrific exploitation. To this day, the world’s largest makers of chocolate bars — Hershey, Mars, Nestle — have not successfully removed child labour from their supply chain.
Ethical sourcing is far from Wonka’s first political pitfall.
Dahl’s novel, for all its inventiveness, makes clear that Wonka’s factory workforce of Oompa Loompas are effectively slaves. Early editions of the 1964 book depicted them as “African Pygmy people.” The 1971 film reimagined the Oompa Loompas to have orange skin and green hair, prompting a retcon in future editions of the book. “This act of obscuring race allowed the master-slave narrative within the content of this narrative to stay intact while the power dynamic between Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas remains unchanged,” writes Chryl Corbin in their study, "Deconstructing Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory: Race, Labor, and the Changing Depictions of the Oompa-Loompas."
Then there’s the author’s famous Jew-hating, and much of his work now being re-edited to make it palatable to modern audiences.
So, beloved as Wonka is, this valuable piece of IP cannot withstand another scandal.
That might explain why the movie’s licensing deals seem to intentionally steer clear of lucrative, but problematic, chocolate bar tie-ins with the major companies. Where are the Wonka-themed Kit Kat bars? Perhaps on a pile of proposals marked as potentially damaging for associating Wonka with child labour.
But chocolate doesn’t have to come from child labour. Many artisanal chocolate makers source their beans using direct trade. This is not the same as Fair Trade, which is a certification process intended to improve the lives of growers but is itself fraught with limitations and problems. Fair Trade certification ensures farmers are paid a premium (about 20 per cent) above commodity pricing. But that rate still leaves farmers in poverty, as the average price of cacao has not significantly changed in 50 years. And Fair Trade’s capacity to conduct human rights inspections is too limited to be effective.
Direct trade is the process of a manufacturer sourcing directly from the farmer. For chocolate makers, this is the only way to create a bean-to-bar chocolate where the characteristics of a particular bean are represented in the product — its flavour complexity closer to wine than a Snickers. This is not possible if dealing with blended, untraceable beans from a distributor. It’s mostly the domain of smaller, craft chocolate makers. But we have several here in Ontario, such as Hummingbird in Almonte, and Soma in Toronto.
Asked about the company’s suppliers, Soma co-owner David Castellan names off a half-dozen farmers from around the world — Madagascar, Jamaica, Vietnam, Tanzania, Ecuador, Peru. He’s visited several and offers their phone numbers if I want to call myself. The cost of direct trade is high. Castellan does not negotiate with suppliers but pays the rate the farmer determines, roughly $8 to $16/kilo for beans, versus the commodity rate of $3.66 (though prices have spiked 75 per cent this year). This, plus other choices about the quality of ingredients and how workers are compensated (Ontario employees can’t go unpaid like Oompa Loompas), results in prices much higher than mass market candy bars. (The term “candy bar” is not just a regionalism, but the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s preferred term for bars comprised mostly of non-chocolate ingredients.)
Something I’ve learned in a few years of parenting is that a little chocolate goes a long way. The first Christmas morning our daughter tore through a stocking loaded with chocolates, cookies, candies, and small toys. She wanted to eat all of them at once and was outraged when we told her to open one and save the rest for later. I’ve figured out that a single bar of something special is far more of a treasure.
As we prepare to stuff our stockings, let’s look past the myth perpetuated by Wonka — that chocolate comes from magic instead of child labour. It should not be mysterious or flow like a river. Wonka is a fantasy story of a good chocolatier versus bad chocolatiers, and that this dichotomy does exist in the real world. So, let's learn from it: the good chocolatiers let you know who they are by telling you where their beans come from.
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