Nestlé has collaborated with several expert partners and suppliers to transform its global cocoa sourcing and achieve full traceability and physical segregation of the cocoa sourced from its income accelerator programme
Nestlé’s favourite chocolate brands made in the UK, including KitKat, Quality Street, Aero, After Eight, Yorkie, Rolo and Munchies, are now using cocoa mass guaranteed to have been sourced from cocoa farming families that are part of Nestlé’s Income Accelerator Programme.
Building on the work of Nestlé’s Cocoa Plan, the Income Accelerator programme was created in January 2022 to help close the living income gap of cocoa-farming families and reduce child labour risk. After a successful test with 10,000 cocoa farming families, 2024 marks the first year of a ‘scale-up phase’, with 30,000 families now enrolled in the programme across Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.
By 2030, the programme aims to reach an estimated 160,000 cocoa-farming families in Nestlé’s cocoa supply chain to create an impact at scale.
The programme incentivises and supports cocoa-farming families to enrol their children in school, implement good agricultural practices, engage in agroforestry activities, and diversify their incomes.
Nestlé has collaborated with several expert partners and suppliers to transform its global cocoa sourcing and achieve full traceability and physical segregation of the cocoa sourced from its income accelerator programme. This means Nestlé can track the entire journey of cocoa beans from groups of farms to factories while keeping them physically separated from other cocoa sources.
The cocoa mass from the income accelerator programme adheres to one of the highest traceability standards, ensuring “mixed identity preserved” traceability, enabling cocoa to be traced and stored separately.
At Nestlé’s York site, up to 12,000 tonnes of cocoa mass are used every year to produce chocolate for a range of brands including KitKat, Quality Street, Aero, After Eight, Yorkie, Rolo and Munchies.
