Tony's Chocolonely

Laying the foundation for Tony’s Chocolonely’s sustainability strategy

Everybody knows Tony’s Chocolonely, the impact company that makes chocolate. Their mission: ending exploitation in the cocoa industry. We were asked to help on that mission by assisting Tony’s in performing their first double materiality assessment in line with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). With a company as advanced, enthusiastic and intrinsically motivated as Tony’s, this was definitely a project to remember!

Creating impact?

Sake van der Meulen is happy to help

+31 (0)70 - 318 44 44

Send an email

Impact areas

Transparent value chains

Services

Duration

November 2024 – June 2025

Involving stakeholders

With Tony’s being a frontrunner in the cocoa and chocolate industry, they of course had a good view of their most important impacts, risks and opportunities already. By performing the double materiality assessment in line with the CSRD requirements, this was further underlined. A key element in getting all relevant insights – aside from the desktop research and peer analysis – was to speak to a wide variety of stakeholders. This means not only speaking to Tony’s employees, but also involving the Tony’s Open Chain team, a financial institution, key customer, a vocal NGO and – maybe most importantly – local perspectives from cocoa cooperatives in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Key challenge: applying focus

In principle, the double materiality assessment itself is not a unique process. The outcomes, however, provide Tony’s with detailed strategic insight into its main positive and/or negative impacts, financial risks and financial opportunities. Starting with the insights from our desktop research, peer analysis, regulation analysis and other relevant sector knowledge, we compiled a longlist of potential material topics and verified this with external stakeholders.

Through the S&P CSRD Scan, we gathered relevant insights from a broad group of internal stakeholders, which were subsequently discussed during intensive working sessions. This helped to obtain clarity and make a first prioritization. The initial outcomes were subsequently tested with various key stakeholders (both internal and external) to derive at the final conclusions.

As you can imagine, for a company like Tony’s, all topics initially seem relevant and material. With so many opinions, views and facts, it was key to align and apply focus in order to arrive at the final material topics. Tony’s will further build on the outcomes in order to strengthen their approach and work towards their goal: ending exploitation in cocoa.

Curious to see the results? Keep an eye out for Tony’s next Annual Fair Report – it’s worth the read regardless of the double materiality assessment!

Impact areas