Did you buy chocolate candy from Mars? Mars uses child labor to make its candy. Would you still have purchased it? Fill out the form to find out your rights »
Hagens Berman has filed a lawsuit against investigating Mars Inc. for its practice of importing cocoa beans from suppliers who use child labor, including trafficked and forced child labor. Specifically, Mars imports cocoa beans from plantations in the Ivory Coast. Based on our investigation and media reports, Hagens Berman attorneys believe that these plantations rely on child labor to harvest the cocoa beans that go into products such as M&Ms, Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Twix and Milky Way, among others.
These children are victims of the worst forms of child labor as recognized by the United Nations: hazardous work such as that involving dangerous tools, transport of heavy loads and exposure to toxic substances and the compulsory labor of trafficked children. Such children are trafficked from countries neighboring the Ivory Coast, sold to plantation owners by brokers and smugglers, and forced to work under conditions of physical violence without pay. According to the World Cocoa Foundation, 47 percent of the total U.S. imports of cocoa beans come from the Ivory Coast.
In violation of California law, Mars does not disclose that their suppliers in the Ivory Coast rely on child laborers and instead continues to profit from the child labor that supplies the chocolate sold to American consumers.
