Nestle USA Inc. convinced a federal judge to dismiss a class action claiming the company’s failure to disclose ties between cocoa production and child and slave labor violates Massachusetts law.
That doesn’t mean “significant ethical questions” don’t exist around the fact that Nestle sources some of its cocoa beans through supply chains based in Côte d’Ivoire, where slave and child labor is “widespread,” Judge Allison Burroughs said in her Jan. 29 opinion.
Plaintiff Danell Tomasella said she and other Massachusetts consumers wouldn’t have purchased Nestle products if the company had disclosed on its packaging that part of its supply chain ...