Food company Nestle is to begin certifying some KitKat bars in Ireland as Fairtrade, following Cadbury, which started producing mass-market Fairtrade chocolate this year.
KitKat four-finger bars will also carry the tag from January in the UK, which represents about 250 million bars. KitKats make up about 23 per cent of Nestle's UK confectionery sales. A quarter of that is the four-finger bars, which had UK sales of £43 million in 2008.
Nestle said the price of the bars would remain the same.
Chocolate makers in the UK sold £28 million pounds of Fairtrade chocolate in the market last year. Cadbury switched its Dairy Milk brand to Fairtrade in July. The share of Fairtrade in that market is set to rise to 10 per cent in 2010 from 1 per cent in 2008 because of Nestle and Cadbury's changes, said Eileen Maybin, a spokeswoman for Fairtrade in the UK.
To get the Fairtrade designation, chocolate makers must pay an extra $150 per ton of cocoa and guarantee a minimum price of $1,600 a ton. The extra money is used for development projects.
Mars said in April that all cocoa it uses will be sustainably sourced, with the approval of US-based Rainforest Alliance, which certifies goods have been produced from farms that meet its social and environmental standards, by 2020.
Nestle plans to provide 12 million stronger, more productive cocoa trees to farmers over the next decade. The company has said it will spend 460 million Swiss francs on cocoa, coffee science and "sustainability" projects over the next decade.
Bloomberg