GATWICK, UK – Nestlé ’s 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 impact at scale.
What is the income accelerator programme?
The programme incentivisies 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 a number of 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 is able to track the entire journey of cocoa beans from groups of farms to factory, while keeping them physically separated from other cocoa sources.
The cocoa mass from the income accelerator programme adhere 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, 12,000 tonnes of cocoa ingredients are used every year to produce chocolate for a range of brands including KitKat, Quality Street, Aero, After Eight, Yorkie, Rolo and Munchies.
This news means that KitKat will begin to feature on-pack information where consumers can scan a QR code to learn more about how the programme works to benefit the livelihoods of cocoa farming families and their communities.
One partner which has played a significant role in the implementation of the Income Accelerator Programme, is the non-profit organisation, Rainforest Alliance. The Rainforest Alliance cocoa certification programme is the world’s largest scale initiative to drive more sustainable cocoa farming and all of the cocoa sourced for Nestlé UK&I continues to be Rainforest Alliance certified.
All of the cocoa Nestlé has sourced for chocolate in the UK & Ireland has been certified since 2015. Throughout 2024, Nestlé plans to use segregated cocoa butter for all of its KitKat chocolate in 29 countries in Europe, with plans to expand to other regions in the coming years.
