Holmgate Primary School and Nursery

Why is chocolate so tasty?

Welcome to Japan's class page all about chocolate!

 

Geography investigation

We did a fantastic geography day where we investigated the question:

Where does chocolate come from?

We started the day by having a look at different chocolate wrappers, and writing down a list of ingredients that different chocolate bars contain.

 

After that, we chose an ingredient from the list: cocoa beans!

We used Swiggle (a child-friendly search engine) to find out which countries produce the most cocoa beans.


We found out that it was hot countries near the equator that usually produce the most cocoa beans.

 

 

Later on, we had a look at what cocoa farmers do, and what processes are involved in turning cocoa beans into chocolate bars. 

 

We then used chocolate to create a visual representation of how much profit goes to these farmers. We predicted what we thought it would be at first, but our predictions were way off! For a standard bar of chocolate which consists on 24 chunks, we found out that cocoa farmers would only get paid for making 1 chunk of it. Cocoa and chocolate companies tend to earn 17 chunks and shops get 5 chunks.

After finding out about everything cocoa farmers had to do to turn the cocoa beans into chocolate, we thought this was really unfair!

 

So, we then learned all about what Fairtrade was by watching these videos:

The Story of Chocolate: Unwrapped

My Fairtrade Adventure

We all felt like Fairtrade was a great idea because supports cocoa farmers to earn a living wage.

In fact, we were so inspired by learning about Fairtrade, that we decided to write lettersto some supermarkets, asking them to make their own-brand products Fairtrade.

Hopefully we will get a reply soon!