Chocolate season: fair trade, organic or what?

Fairtrade, organic or the other sort of chocolate - can you tell the difference?

Last week, with Easter looming, I hatched an experiment to see if my colleagues at Friends of the Earth could.

I picked at random a bunch of Fairtrade-certified and organic chocs from a couple of local shops. Then I invited colleagues to taste them without looking.

And here are the results of my (highly unscientific, non peer-reviewed) research.

Key findings:

1. If you offer free chocolate to all your work mates the number who will drop everything, climb 4 flights of stairs and form an orderly queue is only marginally less than for a fire drill.

2. People can look a bit weird (evidence below) when tasting chocolate - as if they're not actually enjoying it. But maybe that's down to a feeling of guilt about eating chocolate at all.

3. People can look somewhat less weird when tasting organic or Fairtrade chocolate.

4. Most people (93% in this sample) couldn't tell which was Fairtrade, organic or the other stuff. Which means:

• either we might as well eat fairly traded and/or organic chocolate because it tastes as good as (and according to some better than) the other;
• or we might as well eat fairly traded and/or organic because it's better for the people who produce it and for the environment;
• or both.

5. Only 1 out of 15 preferred the chocolate that was neither Fairtrade nor organic.

6. One person thought there was a fruit and nut chocolate. There was no fruit and nut. But test results were not corrected for over-imaginative taste-buds.

7. Cadbury Dairy Milk is now Fairtrade certified (has been for a couple of years - I imagine I'm the last to find that out).

8. Not all Green & Blacks is Fairtrade but it is all organic, and Maya Gold is both. And they've said their entire range will be Fairtrade by the end of this year.

9. The Co-operative offers its own-brand Fairtrade chocolate in a variety of flavours and sizes.

10. "It tastes like normal" - my favourite bit of qualitative feedback because it leads me to reflect that in fact it is now normal to eat fairly traded or organic stuff. My hunch is that 10 years ago it would have been more difficult to say with authority that it's normal. (Sales of all Fairtrade products in the UK alone hit nearly £1.2bn in 2010.)

11. I shouldn't give up the day job for a career in clinical research.

12. For a proper expert ranking of the ethics of chocolate, try Ethical Consumer.

Adam Bradbury, Publishing & New Media Team