World Chocolate Day, 7 July. Photo © Vanessa Lollipop

Introduction and Overview

World Chocolate Day is celebrated on 7 July. These resources have been developed by the GA’s International Special Interest Group and Fieldwork and Outdoor Learning Special Interest Group to help you use this event to develop your students’ geographical understanding.

Activities

World Chocolate Day: KS2 and 3

This resource includes everything you need for a KS2 or KS3 lesson on chocolate, including where cacao is produced, fair trade chocolate, how chocolate is made, and the past relationship between chocolate and slavery. It includes photographs and a video from the GA Study Tour to Nicaragua in 2022.

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World Chocolate Day: How did the development, closure and regeneration of the chocolate factory affect people in Keynsham in the UK? KS3 and 4

This resource is designed to be a full lesson focussing on the causes and impacts of deindustrialisation in the UK using the example of the Somerdale Chocolate Factory in Keynsham. It refers to the roles of a TNC and globalisation in the change, the impact of the loss of the factory and the way the site has been regenerated.

Students are challenged to carry out a cost benefit analysis and decide if the benefits of the closure and regeneration outweigh the costs. This lesson could compliment the teaching of the GCSE ‘Changing Economic World’ topic, but could also be used at KS3. With thanks to Susan Owen for providing an oral history of her involvement with the Somerdale site.

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World Chocolate Day: The importance of packaging

Chocolate is something we all know about but few of us think about the importance of packaging the products. These activities encourage investigation and consideration of how chocolate wrappers have evolved and what information they contain.

Wrappers are important in promoting the sale of products and these tend to change over time to reflect current trends in marketing. How many of us immediately recognise the chocolate bar we want to buy solely by the colour of the wrapper?

These activities concentrate on looking at packaging and identifying what we can learn from it. The activities also cover aspects of literacy such as scanning for details, analysing information, understanding meanings and recognising methods of persuasion.

Packaging activity 1

You may want to introduce the topic of chocolate by using a short video such as the one below which covers the process of chocolate making from cocoa pod to finished product. The video can be divided into sections. Things to think about:

• the idea of fairtrade – its importance
• the impact of technology – the automated processes used. Could that number of bars be made by hand?

YouTube: How 8 million bars of Kit Kat are made in a day

A much smaller enterprise which still uses some technology to package the chocolate bars:

Craft Chocolate TV: Our Semi-Automated Chocolate Packaging Line

Packaging activity 2

Either ask pupils to bring in a chocolate wrapper or present images on a whiteboard.

Questions to consider about the information on the wrapper:

• name of the product and company
• product description
• size and weight
• colours of materials
• what are the packaging materials?
• information about recycling
• list of ingredients and allergy information
• nutrition facts
• best before date
• anything else.

Another useful website to look at is Kitchen Frolic: How Chocolate Wrappers Evolved Over the Years that includes an interesting timeline of the changes in packaging of Cadbury’s chocolate bars.

Author

This Teaching Resource was written for the Geographical Association by Meg Picken, Catherine Owen and Paula Richardson.