MrBeast wants Feastables to be successful so that he can openly criticize chocolate companies for supposedly using child labor

In a recent YouTuber interview on The Diary of a CEO's channel, Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, opened up about how unethical chocolate companies are in the way they source cocoa from farms in West Africa. The famous YouTuber also stated that 46% of labor in the region is child labor.

MrBeast's Feastables chocolate bar launched in the US back in 2022 and since then, he has made several comments about how the company sources its cocoa from ethical sources. In the February 20, 2025, YouTube video, Jimmy expressed his disbelief upon finding out how much of the cocoa farms in West Africa use child labor:

"But the problem is, the majority of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa and so as we got bigger everyone's like, 'Hey, you need to switch your supply chain to West Africa.' I'm like, 'Cool.' So then I started studying and reading up about it. And I noticed that 46% of labor in West Africa on cocoa farms is child labor."

MrBeast went on to harshly criticize chocolate brands and suppliers for not doing anything about the problem with child labor in their supply chains. The streamer claimed he needed to make a billion dollars in revenue to openly challenge the existing companies about unethical consumption:

"What we need to do is get a billion dollars in revenue as fast as possible while being ethically sourced and be profitable. A big part of it is being profitable while doing it is because then I can point and go, 'Look, we achieved scale ethically and we are making money. It's not that you can't do it, you just don't want to.'"

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MrBeast claims chocolate brands are doing nothing to address child labor in the production of their products

In the same interview, MrBeast explained that he had contacted chocolate companies after he found out how prevalent child labor is on cocoa farms:

"I started digging deeper and deeper and I was like holy sh*t it's just almost half of the labor is child labor. And so I started talking to all the big chocolate companies, or not all of them, but as many as I could get a hold of. And I was like, 'So what do you guys do about this whole child labor thing?'"

MrBeast claimed that the big companies just flat out told him "That's how chocolate always has been." The YouTuber expressed outrage at this and pointed out the enormous profits the cocoa products generate:

"And they they kept constantly just telling me like, 'It just is what it is. That's how chocolate always has been. I was like, 'Whoa! You guys make like a billion dollars a year in profit. You don't see an issue with that being on the back of little kids?' And they're like, 'No.'"

He also claimed to have gotten a representative of a big cocoa supplier on camera stating that there was no way to get around using child labor. Even though MrBeast was prepared to pay more for it. The YouTuber said:

"I have this crazy clip. I have a documentary guy, I think you saw him, Jeff, who follows me around. Crazy clip where I'm meeting with a big, um I got to be as vague as possible cuz they're going to murder me. But like a big supplier, we'll just leave it vague like that, and I asked them. I was like, 'So do you have anyway I can pay extra to not use child labor or anything like that?' Or any options. And they were just like, 'No.'"

The entrepreneur went on to insinuate that one of the reasons chocolate in the United States remains so cheap is because companies do not pay the farmers fairly:

"Then I just was like, 'How do we solve this?' So then it sent me down the rabbit hole and everything points back to the reason chocolate in America is so cheap is because they just don't, not the reason but one of the reasons, they just pay the farmer so little."

MrBeast claimed that the farmers' low pay forces them to employ children as labor:

"Farmers make less than a dollar a day. So because of that, they're forced to use child labor. Because, I mean, they literally just don't even have money to pay someone who's not a child. How many kids do you think are in child labor in West Africa just, on cocoa farms?"

He also said that as per his research, approximately 1.5 million child laborers work in cocoa farms in West Africa:

"No, it's 1.5 million. Yeah, it's over a million! It's crazy"

MrBeast's Feastables chocolate brand has been released in various countries around the world since its initial launch almost three years ago. It came to India last year along with the launch of PRIME beverages.