Over the weekend, The Guardian carried an article about Kraft's purchase of Cadbury.  The first three paragraphs were telling, and damning:

Kraft has promised to honour Cadbury's current deal to sell Fairtrade chocolate after fears that it would stop selling ethically-sourced confectionery if its takeover goes ahead.

Jonathan Horrell, the UK corporate affairs director for the US food conglomerate, said Kraft already worked "extensively" with sustainably sourced cocoa and coffee suppliers and planned to maintain Cadbury's contracts with the Fairtrade Foundation.

But he would not confirm whether Kraft would continue Cadbury's ongoing talks to expand its use of Fairtrade cocoa beans into other brands – a major and continuing worry for the Fairtrade Foundation.

When I first read this article, I was furious.

It sounds exactly like Kraft’s standard practice: keep ‘em quiet and then shut up shop.  An excellent example of this is when they bought the chocolate manufacturers Terry’s of York and, having promised to maintain the factory in NE England, closed it and shipped production to Poland in 2005.

So they will maintain Cadbury’s Fairtrade deals for now but won’t expand them.  Once it’s convenient for them to drop the Fairtrade marque and get cheaper chocolate, they will ... and they’ll rake in the profits generated for the institutional shareholders in the US at the same time.

Nothing exemplifies corporate cynicism and greed more than this statement and, I’m afraid, tinkering on the sidelines by Messers Brown and Obama will do little to change the situation.

If Kraft were truly a CSR company they would have sought to maximise the Fairtrade credentials they’d just bought and thought about how much those credentials mean in the heartland of the brand they’d just bought.

They may even have realised that they’d just bought one of the founders of the industrial corporate responsibility movement.

Instead, all they’ve said is “well you can’t dance our tune, but we’ll soon learn you”.  It’s despicable, and I hope their shares go through the floor.

^{Picture Credit: Emotionally I call this Melting Chocolates by bottleredhead from flickr under Creative Commons No Derivitives License.}