From West African farms to a US courtroom, Lindt is learning that premium chocolate has a bitter aftertaste. But what does all this have to do with Roald Dahl?
Over the course of the last week, I’ve been steadily working my way through the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my young daughter. Every day after school, she sits at the dining room table eating her lunch while I read to her about Golden Tickets, Oompa Loompas and Indian princes with melting chocolate palaces.
Dahl’s writing has been through some tough times in terms of having ideas and descriptions of characters that wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) make it past a modern editor. But beneath the problematic stuff, his writing is rich and descriptive. He brings a fantastical world to life with an ease that renders even my four-year-old content to sit still and listen (for a change).
But it was one particular passage, where he describes the bitterly poor protagonist Charlie Bucket’s strategy for making his annual birthday chocolate last, that transported me straight back to a moment from my own childhood:
“Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month.”
There was only one chocolate bar that I treated with this level of reverence in my lifetime, and it was the first Lindt bar that I was given as a gift on my 11th birthday.
Why anyone thought that this was an appropriate gift for an 11-year-old I will never know – but from the moment I tore open the foil corner and caught a whiff of the rich chocolate inside, I knew that this was no ordinary KitKat or Bar-One. This was something special, to be eaten as slowly as possible.
Charlie managed to make his chocolate bar last for more than 30 days. I think mine lasted about 10, which is still impressive.
It’s easy to forget that even Willy Wonka’s fantastical chocolate factory had its dark days. Long before the Golden Tickets, he was forced to shut his gates and send his workers home.
Lindt hasn’t locked its doors, and there are no rival spies stealing recipes (as far as I know), but the Swiss chocolatier is facing a run of challenges that has seen it hike prices by 19% last year and almost 12% in the first half of this year. And then, earlier this week, the company sent its CEO packing.
These days, I suspect a lot more of us will be eating our Lindt the way Charlie ate his birthday bar: in tiny nibbles, making it last. Not out of reverence, but out of necessity.
A bittersweet supply chain
Lindt’s troubles begin nearly 5,000 km north of where I sit reading at my dining room table, on the cocoa farms of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
Let me sketch the landscape as it stands today. West Africa produces about 70% of the world’s cocoa. That’s really close to having all your eggs in one basket, which means that any disruption in the region is almost guaranteed to have a global knock-on effect. In recent years, the region has been battered by erratic weather and crop disease.
Cause, meet effect: the price of cocoa shot from under $3,000 a tonne in early 2023 to a record of nearly $13,000 by the end of 2024.
Every chocolate maker has felt the squeeze, but many mass-market brands found a workaround. They shrank their bars, cut the cocoa and bulked up their recipes with cheaper vegetable fats, sometimes to the point where the result can only be sold as “chocolate-flavoured”.
Lindt’s problem is that they can’t take that shortcut without breaking the very promise that made me ration my birthday bar all those years ago. Their reputation rests on high cocoa content, so cocoa makes up a far bigger share of their costs than it does for brands that lean on palm oil. And because chocolate makers buy their cocoa months or even years in advance, those costs took time to reach the shelf.
Lindt passed the costs on gradually. Last year, shoppers started to push back. This year, they have had enough.
It’s not hard to see why. When the cost of living climbs and belts tighten, a slab of the fancy stuff is one of the first things to be put back on the shelf. Shoppers in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, arguably Lindt’s heartland, turned out to be far more price-sensitive than the company expected. Even the weather piled on, as a sweltering European summer dampened appetites for chocolate. The result was that Lindt’s sales volumes fell 7.5% in the first half of 2026, which forced them to be more price competitive and introduce smaller packs.
I wondered whether weight-loss drugs might also be dampening demand. In the US, at least, they don’t appear to be. Many in the industry feared that Ozempic and Mounjaro would kill our cravings for sweets, but Lindt’s own US data suggests the opposite. In 2025, households using GLP-1 drugs increased their spending on premium chocolate far faster than everyone else, trading mindless snacking for smaller, more luxurious treats. The craving hasn’t gone. It’s just developed expensive taste.
Cocoa prices have eased since their 2024 peak, but chocolate-lovers shouldn’t rejoice just yet. The outlook remains shaky. Ghana’s cocoa regulator expects next season’s harvest to fall by at least 16%. It blames bad weather, disease, ageing trees and illegal gold mining.
Illegal gold mining? How does that fit in?
With gold prices soaring and cocoa paying little, struggling farmers are selling or leasing their land to miners, who dig it up and leave it poisoned with mercury. It’s a desperate, short-term fix with a long effect, since that land rarely recovers.
Next door, things hardly look better: Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest grower, is bracing for a drop of more than 10%.
The dark heart
While reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory aloud, I am reminded of the fact that Mr Wonka’s spectacular factory is staffed exclusively by Oompa Loompas. These are described as small people, formerly jungle-dwelling, who Mr Wonka convinces to live and work in his factory in exchange for cocoa beans.
Therein lies one of the problematic elements of Dahl’s writing. This is the better version, as the original book in 1964 had the Oompa Loompas as black pygmies, shipped straight from Africa. He rewrote them as magical Oompa Loompas in 1973 after criticism from the NAACP (a civil rights organisation) and a very public spat with the children’s author Eleanor Cameron.
The pygmies may be gone, but the parallel with a terrible situation around real children picking cocoa in West Africa is hard to ignore.
Earlier this year, International Rights Advocates, a Washington DC-based law firm, sued Lindt. In July, the case moved to a US federal court. It alleges that Lindt has known for more than 20 years that children work on the Ghanaian and Ivorian farms that supply its cocoa, and that it has gone on profiting regardless.
Notably, the lawsuit isn’t after money. Its target is the wrapper. The firm argues that the ethical certifications printed on Lindt’s packaging lead shoppers to see the company as a force against child labour, while alleging that Lindt’s actual efforts have fallen short of those claims. In other words, it takes aim at what a premium brand sells alongside the chocolate: the sense that you’re buying something good, in every sense of the word.
Lindt denies the allegations and says it condemns all forms of child labour. It points out that the same firm has brought similar cases against Nestlé, Mars and other chocolate makers. It says it investigates suspected cases of child labour in its supply chain, and says its sourcing programme relies on Rainforest Alliance certification.
Whatever the court decides, the case points to a problem that runs through the entire industry, and it’s the same one driving farmers to sell their land to gold miners: despite the premiums put on the chocolate bars, the essential cocoa that goes into them still doesn’t pay enough to live on.
A certification sticker can’t change that.
In Dahl’s story, the workers were paid in cocoa beans. In the real one, many of the people who grow them are paid too little to keep their children out of the fields.
Making it last
Charlie’s story has a happy ending (spoiler alert), but Lindt’s is still being written. Cocoa remains at the mercy of the weather, the lawsuit will take time to play out, and a permanent new CEO isn’t expected until the second quarter of 2027.
None of that will be settled by the time we finish the book. This leaves me at the dining room table with a question of my own: if both the story and the chocolate come with a slightly bitter aftertaste, should I keep either of them away from my daughter?
I don’t think so. Shielding her from everything complicated isn’t the same as raising her well, and it would cost her some of the best parts of being small. So we’ll keep reading Mr. Dahl, and when we reach the bits that haven’t aged well, we’ll stop and talk about them. And one day, when she’s old enough (somewhere comfortably past 11), I’ll hand her a bar of the fancy stuff, teach her to peel back the foil one corner at a time, and tell her that somebody grew what’s inside, and that they deserve to be paid properly for it.
The idealist in me hopes that, by then, the children of cocoa-growing families are in classrooms, listening to someone read them a (suitably revised) story about a chocolate factory.
About the author: Dominique Olivier
Dominique Olivier uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.
Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.
She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.
You can learn more about her work at dominiqueolivier.com and she can be reached on LinkedIn here.
