Do we like Cadbury?
Chocolate maker (Dairy Milk, Creme Egg) with UK roots in Bournville; now a brand of US snack giant Mondelēz International.
Our score: 4 out of 10. Not yet. People love the chocolate, but the cocoa supply chain still has child-labour and deforestation allegations, and parent Mondelēz was fined €337.5m by the EU. Cocoa Life is a real effort.
Cadbury is a British chocolate name, but it now belongs to Mondelēz International, the Chicago-based company behind Oreo, Milka and Toblerone. Dirk Van de Put has been its CEO since November 2017 and chair since 2018. So when we judge Cadbury, we're judging Mondelēz's choices too.
The big stain is cocoa. In 2022 a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation claimed children as young as 10 were harvesting cocoa in Ghana for Mondelēz. In August 2026 ABC's Four Corners filmed boys doing hazardous work in a Cocoa Life community. Four Corners hadn't established whether that farm supplied Mondelēz. Mondelēz says it prohibits child labour.
The environment is shaky too. Dutch nonprofit AidEnvironment's assessment linked Mondelēz's cocoa and palm oil chains to more than 4,100 hectares of forest cleared after the cutoff dates it checked. Mondelēz says it has been working with the Cocoa & Forests Initiative, and Cocoa Life mapped about 304,000 farms in 2025.
On the money side, the European Commission fined Mondelēz €337.5m in 2024. It found the company restricted cross-border sales within the EU, which kept prices higher for shoppers. Mondelēz called these historical, isolated incidents and settled the case.
To be fair, Mondelēz is spending real money. It has pledged $1bn on Cocoa Life by 2030 to tackle child labour, farmer poverty and deforestation. Even so, that hasn't yet shown up in the evidence. We'd say a cautious 4 out of 10: we'd wait for the cocoa chain to be proven clean.