Chocolate giant Cadbury ‘still pushing orangutans towards extinction by wrecking habitat for palm oil’

Destruction likely to be just the tip of the iceberg, campaigners warn

The maker of Cadbury chocolate bars, Oreo biscuits and Ritz crackers is accused of destroying tens of thousands of hectares of orangutan habitat in just two years for palm oil.

Suppliers to food giant Mondelez have destroyed 70,000 hectares since 2016, analysis by Greenpeace International claims, pushing the primate further towards extinction.

The areas razed to the ground include 25,000 hectares of habitations in Indonesia that are home to the critically endangered orangutan.

Mondelez, which is one of the world’s biggest buyers of palm oil, uses it in many of its most popular products, including Cadbury and Roses chocolates, Oreos and Ritz crackers.

The new investigation, carried out through mapping Indonesia, discovered that between 2015 and 2017, 22 of the company’s palm oil suppliers cleared at least 70,000 hectares of rainforest – an area bigger than the City of Chicago, where Mondelez is based.

In a 31-page report detailing the supply chains of the main brands the charity says are responsible for destruction, Greenpeace points the finger largely at the producer of some of Britain’s favourite chocolates and snacks.

The report says that although Mondelez claims to have been purchasing entirely responsible palm oil since 2013, “in practice almost 95 per cent of the palm oil it buys is covered by ‘book-and-claim’ certificates – by far the weakest of the certification models offered by the main palm oil industry body, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)”.

"Orangutans are literally dying for a biscuit," Greenpeace’s Kiki Taufik

“This means that the plantations and producer groups from which the overwhelming majority of the palm oil that Mondelez purchases is sourced are not governed by any sustainability initiatives,” the study claims.

Greenpeace’s campaign against destructive palm oil hit the headlines over the weekend when a video that Iceland repurposed for a Christmas advert was banned from television for being “political”.

Campaigners have warned “it’s now or never” for Indonesia’s critically endangered orangutans, which are being killed at a rate of 25 a day as natural vegetation is bulldozed to make way for palm plantations.

In September this year Greenpeace International published Final Countdown, a report that showed Mondelez was sourcing palm oil from 22 of 25 destructive producer groups. “Alarmingly, these are just the cases that Greenpeace was able to identify – Mondelez sources from hundreds of palm oil companies and this destruction is likely just the tip of the iceberg,” it said.

Kiki Taufik, head of Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s Indonesia forests campaign, said: “It’s outrageous that despite promising to clean up its palm oil almost 10 years ago, Mondelez is still trading with forest destroyers.

“Palm oil can be made without destroying forests, yet our investigation discovered that Mondelez suppliers are still trashing forests and wrecking orangutan habitat, pushing these beautiful and intelligent creatures to the brink of extinction.

“They’re literally dying for a biscuit.”

Bornean orangutan numbers have halved in 16 years, studies show, and both the Sumatran and newly discovered Tapanuli orangutan lost more than half their habitat between 1985 and 2007.

All three species are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as critically endangered, along with the Sumatran tiger and Sumatran rhino.

A spokeswoman for Mondelez International told The Independent the company was committed to eradicating deforestation in the palm oil supply and it was actively working with suppliers to ensure palm oil was fully traceable.

“We’re calling on our suppliers to further map and monitor the plantations where oil is grown so we can drive further traceability. We’re excluding 12 upstream suppliers from our supply chain who have not met our standards.

“For many years we have been calling for 100 per cent sustainable and we’re making good progress on our palm oil action plan.
“This includes actionable steps to ensure the palm oil we buy is produced on legally held land, does not lead to deforestation or loss of peat land, respects human rights and does not use forced or child labour.

“At the end of 2017, 96 per cent of our palm oil was traceable back to mill and 99 per cent was from suppliers with policies aligned to ours.”

She added that Mondelez was calling on suppliers to improve practices and to engage third-party suppliers to ensure production was fully sustainable and traceable.

“We will continue to prioritise suppliers that meet our principles, and exclude those that don’t,” she said.

(Source: The Independent)

How Swadeshi movement gave India its beloved biscuit Parle-G

A much-loved chai staple in India, Parle G is something most Indians have grown up eating. Here’s the interesting story of this legendary yet humble biscuit. Did you know that if you line up all the Parle-G biscuits consumed annually, end to end, you can go around the planet 192 times? 

Parle G — a name that instantly brings back childhood memories of dunking crisp biscuits in a hot cup of milk and quickly having the soggy piece before it crumbled back into the milk. A much-loved chai staple in India, the humble rectangular biscuit is something most Indians have grown up eating.

Even today, many people across the country wake up to a cup of tea and Parle-G every morning. Little wonder that for millions of Indians, it isn’t just any other biscuit: it’s comfort food!

So if you are one of Parle-G’s die-hard fans, here’s a tale to tease your taste buds – the story of Parle, India’s largest biscuit maker, and its signature product.

The year was in 1929. Mohanlal Dayal of the Chauhans, a Mumbai-based family of silk traders, had just bought and refurbished a decrepit, old factory to manufacture confectionery (such as boiled sweets).

Deeply influenced by the Swadeshi movement (that promoted the production and use of Indian goods), Chauhan had sailed to Germany a few years ago to learn the art of confectionery-making. He returned in 1929, armed with the required skills as well as the required machinery (imported from Germany for Rs 60,000).

Located between the sleepy villages of Irla and Parla, the small factory set up by the Chauhans employed just 12 men with the family members themselves serving in multiple capacities — as engineers, managers, and confectionery makers.

Interestingly, it is believed that the founders were so busy managing the factory that they forgot to name it.

And so with time, the first Indian owned confectionery brand in the country came to be known after its place of birth — Parle.

Parle’s first product was an orange candy that was soon followed by other confectioneries and toffees. However, it was only 10 years later that it began its biscuit making operations. Even as the bugle for World War II was sounded in 1939, the company baked its first biscuit.

Back then, biscuits were mostly imported, expensive and meant for consumption by the elite classes. United Biscuits, Huntly & Palmers, Britannia and Glaxo were the prominent British brands that ruled the market.

It was to counter this trend that Parle Products launched Parle Gluco as an affordable source of nourishment for the common masses. Made in India, meant for Indian palates and accessible to every Indian, the humble biscuit quickly became popular with the public. It was also much-in-demand by the British-Indian army during World War II.

However, in 1947, a severe shortage of wheat (India was left with only 63% of its wheat cultivation area after Partition) immediately after Independence meant that the production of Parle Gluco biscuits had to stop for a while.

In an ad saluting Indians who had sacrificed their lives for the freedom of their motherland, Parle urged its consumers to make do with barley biscuits till wheat supplies were restored to normal.

In 1960, Parle Products started feeling the pinch when other players in the market began launching their own glucose biscuits. For instance, Britannia launched its first glucose biscuit brand, Glucose D, and had it endorsed by Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan’s avatar in Sholay). Confused by similar brand names, most people would just ask shopkeepers for glucose biscuits.

To battle the flood of knock-offs, the firm decided to create a packaging that would be unique to Parle Gluco while patenting its own packing machinery. The new packaging was a yellowish wax-paper wrapper with a plump little girl imprinted on it (an illustration by Everest Brand Solutions), along with the brand name and company’s red-coloured logo.

However, while the new packaging clicked with the biscuit’s target audience — kids and their mothers, it still failed to decisively distinguish Parle Gluco from the horde of “me-too” glucose biscuit brands in the market. This prompted the management to rechristen the biscuit and see if it helped it stand out from the crowd.

And so in 1982, Parle Gluco was repackaged as Parle G, with the ‘G’ standing for glucose, of course. To avoid duplication by small biscuit-makers (who sold their low-quality biscuits in a similar yellow wax paper), the packaging material was change to low-cost printed plastic.

Its cheeky new tagline stated, “Often imitated, never equalled”.

This was quickly followed by an innovative TV commercial in which a burly Dadaji and his precocious grandchildren sang in chorus — “Swaad bhare, Shakti bhare, Parle-G”. In 1998, Parle-G found a quirky brand endorser in Shaktiman, the desi superhero from a telly screen who was immensely popular with Indian kids.

And Parle products have not looked back since. From “G Maane Genius” and “Hindustan ki Taakat” to “Roko Mat, Toko Mat“, Parle- G’s fun yet relatable ads helped it move its image from mono-dimensional to multi-dimensional — from an energy biscuit to a source of strength and creativity.

For instance, its 2013 ad campaign encourages parents to give their kids a free hand in pursuing their dreams. The jingle, for which Gulzar lent his pen and Piyush Mishra lent his voice, celebrates “Kal ke Genius“.

Its most recent campaign, “Woh Pehli Waali Baat“, has people in different scenarios talking of changes that have taken place over the years.

These perfectly-executed campaigns and the biscuits’ reliable quality are among the key reasons for the brand’s success over the years. Today, the company boasts of astounding sales figures of over a billion packets a month. That is around a hundred million packets of Parle G every month, or 14,600 crore biscuits in the entire year, which adds up to 121 biscuits each for 1.21 billion Indians.

In fact, the biscuit is so popular that some restaurants have started using it to make high-end desserts. For example, Farzi Cafe has invented a Parle G cheesecake and Mumbai’s 145 has a Parle G Eatshake!

Nonetheless, despite its swift growth and heavy demand, the brand has remained true to its philosophy. It is consumed by people from every strata of society; from a person sitting in an urban high rise to a person in the smallest of towns. It is also the only brand that is easily available at places like a village of 100 people near the LoC.

Maybe that’s the reason this humble glucose biscuit has retained its special place in the heart of all Indians, despite new biscuits entering the market every other day.

Here’s some interesting trivia to end the story of the world’s largest selling biscuit!

• If you line up all the Parle-G biscuits consumed annually, end to end, you can go around the Earth 192 times.
• The amount of sugar used to make 13 billion Parle-G biscuits — 16,100 tons — can cover the streets of the world’s smallest city, the Vatican City.
• 400 million Parle-G biscuits are produced daily, and if a month’s production of the biscuits is stacked side by side, the distance between the Earth and the Moon can be covered.

(Source: The Better India)