Nestle commissioned OnePoll to conduct research to better understand the consumer attitudes, opinions and habits surrounding chocolate purchasing. More specifically, they wanted to know about whether ethical and sustainability considerations are made during the purchasing process.
For this research, we surveyed 4,000 frequent chocolate purchasers (those who buy it at least once per month). The research project was carried out in January 2022.
We first asked which factors most inform the respondents’ decision to buy chocolate. The top three influences were the taste/flavour of the product (80%), followed by the price (60%) and whether the person had bought it previously and enjoyed it (46%).
We then went on to ask how important ethical/sustainable factors such as farmer income, child labour, deforestation, palm oil usage etc. are to them. All these aspects were deemed to be at important by at least 70% of the sample, but only 9% selected ethics/sustainability as a key informing decision in whether they would buy chocolate.
36% reported that they would know what to look for to determine whether a brand uses sustainably sourced ingredients, 34% would not. We included some image symbols to test awareness and knowledge of what they mean. These are often present on chocolate products to mean different things related to sustainability. Some of these included the Nestlé Cocoa Plan symbol, Fairtrade symbol and RSPO symbol.
We finished the survey off by asking unaided and aided awareness questions detailing which chocolate manufacturers respondents think are currently doing the ‘right’ thing and which could ‘do better’ in supporting cocoa farmers, sustainability and responsible cocoa sourcing.
Excel tables and an executive summary summarising key figures and insight were sent to the client at the end of the research project.