PolitiCook.net

Green Lollies for a Clean Conscience!

Want to buy a day’s worth of carbon offsets with your chocolate bar? How about donating to breast cancer research with your breath mints? Or saving the animals with a candy dispenser?

Candy with a conscience (I love that name) is one of the latest trends to come out of the annual confectioner’s convention as manufacturers jostle to grab the attention of consumers on increasingly crowded store shelves.

New Zealand’s Bloomsberry chocolates had been selling trendy, tongue-in-cheek chocolate bars in the United States for less than two years when they were approached by Whole Foods to develop Climate Change Chocolate. Wind turbines and a huge footprint cover the chocolate bar’s boxes and the wrapper is speckled with tips on how to be more green like “let the sun shine in. Opening curtains and blinds to capture the warmth of the sun saves on heating and your cat will love you for it!”

Marketed as the “first taste of a lower-carbon lifestyle,” Bloomsberry donates 55 cents from each bar to TerraPass to pay for 133 pounds of carbon offsets, which is the average American’s daily carbon impact. That’s a great idea, IMO.

The bars, which were launched in the United States in January and may eventually be sold overseas, come at an opportune time: about 36 per cent of US shoppers said in a recent survey that they regularly buy “green” products, up from just 12 per cent in 2006. For California-based Hint Mint, the decision to sell breast cancer awareness containers was more personal: the marketing director’s mother is a breast cancer survivor.

Candy and chocolate are largely recession proof and sales have been climbing steadily for years, hitting 29.1 billion US dollars last year in the United States alone. That ain’t chump change!