The Life of the M&M’s I devoured
1. What are the ingredients?
This product’s main ingredient is milk chocolate, other ingredients include: sugar, peanuts, cornstarch, less than 1% palm oil, corn syrup, dextrin, several colorings, carnauba wax, and gum acacia.
2. Where do they come from?
Mars Inc. is the company that makes the M&M’s and they get their chocolate from several cocoa-growing regions of Asia and West Africa. The sugar comes from plantations in southern U.S.
3. What are the working and living conditions of the people who produce the cocoa?
Cocoa farmers in West African nations are typically local/ family owned farms. Which means, no heavy or advanced machinery is being used, most to all work is done by hands and take long hot hours.
4. How is it produced? Are child laborers involved?
Pods containing cocoa beans grow from the trunk and branches of the cocoa tree. Harvesting involves removing ripe pods from the trees and opening them to extract the wet beans.Once they’ve been harvested, the beans are removed, fermented, dried and roasted. Most to all of these jobs are done by children and family members in rural areas. After being packaged, they are shipped off to different companies worldwide and used to produce cocoa products.
5. How do the producers get the cocoa to the market?
After the cocoa have been turned into consumer loving products, those products are loaded onto trucks and shipped off to warehouses. From there, the orders are sent out for delivery to stores and retail outlets.
Prices, as with every commodity, is based off supply and demand. As demand increase, so does prices. Also, production costs plays apart in this.
7. Which international corporations dominate the chocolate trade?Who regulates it?
There are two main companies that dominate the the chocolate trade- Mars Inc. and Hershey Trust Company. Trade is regulated by the government laws of the land.
8. How is chocolate marketed?
Mainly through magazine ads, commercials, and billboards. Some can even be found in tv shows, comics, and mainly anything that attracts kids because they are the main consumers of the products.
I bought this package of M&M’s from my usual place: vending machine in Rawlings Hall (where I live).
10. How much profit does a store owner make on a bar of chocolate?
Store owners make about ⅓ of the retail price.
11. Are there hidden cost that are not included in the price you paid? Consider under payment of labor; environmental impact; government subsidies that are direct (to the company) and indirect (infrastructure such as roads, ports, bridges, and water systems) ; and the health care costs created by harvesting transporting processing or eating the food? How are these costs obscured?
The farmers barely make enough money to send their kids to school, so in turn, kids spend long hours working on these farms. The cost of these kids education should be taken into consideration when we think of these products.
The Life of the M&M’s I devoured.
I was born in Ivory Coast, that’s a country in West Africa. This kid, Dieu Donne took care of me on his parents farm, he was in charge of us cocoa beans and his sister was in charge of the okras on the other side of the farm. After being harvested, I knew I would no longer see my care taker because I was packaged and sent off to a port when I was 5 years old. I remember being shipped to a factory and grinded up. This factory turned me- a cocoa bean into cocoa powder. I was then shipped off to a facility where I was used as ingredients for a company called MARS Inc., I remember a piece of me was used for something called Snickers but the majority of me was used for M&M’s peanut candy. I was shipped off to different factories and woke up in a vending machine. After a man staring at me while seductively licking his lips purchased me, I fell from the vending machine. He ripped me open and chewed me up, all while whispering to himself - “Damn this some good chocolate”.
