In West Africa, where chocolate begins its journey to shelves across the globe, Mondelēz International has achieved near-complete oversight of child labor risks across roughly 2,300 cocoa farming communities—a milestone that reveals both the scale of the challenge and the company's commitment to confronting it head-on.
The world's snack food giant released its 2025 Human Rights Due Diligence and Modern Slavery Report on World Day Against Child Labor, documenting substantial progress in preventing exploitation across its own operations and the vast, complex networks that supply its ingredients. What makes this moment significant is not just the numbers, but what they represent: a systematic effort to shift from reactive compliance toward preventive accountability across an entire supply chain that touches millions of lives.
Mondelēz achieved roughly 100% Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation Systems coverage of its Cocoa Life communities in West Africa—the signature result of years of work embedding monitoring directly into farming communities. The company's human rights training has reached 50,000 colleagues since 2021, including 7,000 in manufacturing and logistics roles and 3,000 in key stewardship positions. Meanwhile, the company audited more than 1,200 prioritized tier-one supplier sites in 2025 alone, expanding oversight across the supply chain. About 100 strategic suppliers have been engaged in joint industry trainings across Brazil, India, Mexico, and the United States since 2024, helping embed human rights due diligence practices at scale.
The company also achieved roughly 100% SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) coverage across its owned manufacturing plants over the past three years, with roughly 99% of prioritized tier-one suppliers completing third-party audits. These are not simple metrics—they represent thousands of detailed audits and remediation efforts in some of the world's most complex sourcing regions.
Darren O'Brien, Mondelēz's Chief Corporate & Government Affairs Officer and Chief Cocoa Officer, framed the work as inseparable from business value itself. "More sustainable business is, and always will be, good business," he said, emphasizing that an enhanced human rights due diligence approach enables the company to meet long-term goals while addressing systemic issues through partnerships.
Cocoa Life, the company's flagship sustainability initiative, exemplifies this approach. Beyond monitoring child labor, the program develops ways to make cocoa farming more profitable, protects and restores forest land, and lifts local cocoa communities through women's empowerment, income diversification, and entrepreneurship—particularly via Village Savings and Loan Associations and partnerships with CARE International.
Yet Mondelēz also recognizes that company-level action alone cannot solve industry-wide challenges. The company is contributing to sector-wide solutions through the International Cocoa Initiative, supporting public-private partnerships to improve school access in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, and joining platforms like Bonsucro for sustainable sugarcane production. On palm oil, the company strengthened its 2025 action plan to require suppliers respect human rights, land rights, and Free Prior and Informed Consent—joining the Consumer Goods Forum's Human Rights Coalition to tackle root causes of land rights violations in Indonesia.
This layered approach—combining internal audit rigor, supplier training, community-level monitoring, and cross-industry collaboration—suggests a company betting that entangled global supply chains demand entangled solutions. Whether that bet pays off in meaningful human welfare improvements will depend on how thoroughly these commitments are followed through in practice.