I'm not sure it's shocking to anyone that the Hershey bar you pick up at the store isn't that good. One stop at a real chocolatier is all it takes to notice the difference between a lot of mass-produced chocolate and a confection made locally.  Yet, that's the least of the reasons to avoid the three following brands of chocolate in Missouri.

In a nutshell, it has less to do with the finished product being lousy and much more to do with everything that happens before these chocolate products get made. And yet, we've all probably bought these products before, blissfully unaware of, as they say, "how the sausage is made."  Here are the highlights from the worst of the worst from 24/7 Wall Street's article "8 Chocolate Brands to Avoid."

Hershey's Chocolate

Unfortunately for fans of the iconic American chocolate bar, Hershey's has had various issues with its chocolate. First, it's the taste; Hershey uses a secret process to make its chocolate, and part of the process produces butyric acid in the chocolate, making it tangy and overpowering the flavor of the cocoa. While we're used to it, foreigners don't like it. 24/7 Wall Street says some in the UK compare it to the smell and taste of vomit.

Next it's that fact that in 2006, ABC News discovered many of Hershey's products weren't technically chocolate. They had begun to replace the cocoa butter with vegetable oil, so the FDA said the chocolate bars couldn't be called chocolate. The candy maker got around it by calling products "chocolate candy" and "chocolatey."

Things went from bad to worse when Whole Foods decided to dump Hershey's Scharffen Berger brand of chocolate because it wasn't fair trade and used child laborers, and Hershey didn't seem to care. In response, Hershey announced they would transition to 100% certified cocoa by 2020 and eliminate child labor on their farms. Then, they turned around and said they couldn't guarantee their chocolate products were free from slave labor because they could only trace about 50% of the cocoa they could use.

Then, in 2022, Hershey was named in a lawsuit that they knew about high levels of lead and cadmium in their chocolate but refused to warn their customers.

Unfortunately, the revolting theme that will continue as I get to the following two chocolate brands to avoid has much less to do with the finished products than how they exploit people in sourcing their raw materials.

Nestle

Everyone likes Toll House Cookies, right? Their chocolate chips are the gold standard for chocolate chip cookies. Yet you might feel differently about them after learning that Nestle has faced criticism and lawsuits related to various products it produces, not just chocolate.

When it comes to chocolate, Nestle has faced lawsuits and widespread criticism for its use of slavery, child labor, and child trafficking in its chocolate production. Wall Street 24/7 asserts it promised to phase out child labor from its process but hasn't. Along with other food and chocolate companies, they formed an organization to address slave labor in the industry. Still, the organization is toothless, and Nestle has been called out for breaking its promises and misleading the public about doing anything about it. Wall Street 24/7 also alleges Nestle instructs the farms that supply them to hide evidence of child labor and exploitation.

Mars

If you think Hershey and Nestle are evil, Mars is worse. Wall Street 24/7 cites the Washington Post as citing that Mars's promises to eliminate chocolate made by slave labor from its factories were not kept in 2001. Mars said they'd do that in 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2020. None of those deadlines were met.

They also faced criticism for buying cocoa beans from West African farms using unpaid and underpaid child labor. In 2019, Mars said they could not and would not guarantee that any of their chocolate products were free from child slave labor since they couldn't verify where two-thirds of the cocoa they used was sourced, and the company wasn't willing to source from places they could trade from legally.

In 2021, eight former child slaves from Mali sued Mars, as well as Hershey, Nestle, and other companies, saying they knew about their conditions and the source of the chocolate and aided and supported their enslavement. The United States Supreme Court dismissed the suit because it didn't happen in the United States.

More recently, a CBS investigation found children as young as five working in the Mars supply chain in Ghana in dangerous conditions.

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The Bottom Line

Bluntly, the use of child labor and slave labor is terrible. More revolting is how these multinational companies don't even seem to care that they do it. That's what's most disturbing to me.

The cocoa and chocolate business is big business. Maybe these companies feel that if they took a stand for how their ingredients were sourced and how the people at that end were treated, we'd be paying $5 for a candy bar at the grocery store or gas station check-out counter. Maybe it's the nature of the business, and if they tried to use more reputable suppliers if they existed, they couldn't get enough supplies to make what they need to keep us in chocolate.

I don't know, yet it isn't comforting to see how the ingredients for many of our chocolatey treats are made in these cases. Sadly, that Toll House Cookie or Hershey Bar isn't as sweet anymore.