Summary: Many social enterprises achieve positive social change in local, contained contexts but very few achieve lasting change in their wider industry. Drawing on an in-depth study of Tony’s Chocolonely, we distil three lessons for organisations who want to scale their social impact: compete in the mass market, collaborate with key industry players, and defend your approach and solution when they come under attack.
The key challenge every social enterprise faces
Plenty of social enterprises set out to fix a broken system — from exploitative supply chains to unsustainable practices that harm people and planet — but very few manage to change the system itself. Often, they achieve positive outcomes for a small group of people or among their consumers and partners. But the wider industry they operate in often carries on just like before.
Why does this happen? Because the established companies that need to change often benefit from the status quo and therefore want to keep things as they are. When a social enterprise challenges them with a better way of doing things, they typically respond in one of two ways. They either push the social enterprise to a niche market where it can’t do much harm to them (marginalisation), or they let the social enterprise into their market but only after watering down its solution until it’s less harmful (co-optation). Either way, the social enterprise’s impact usually remains marginal with little lasting change in the wider industry.
We set out to understand how social enterprises can avoid this trap. To do so, we studied one social enterprise that was successful in changing the very system and industry it operates in: Tony’s Chocolonely (in the following: Tony’s).
Tony’s started in 2003 as a Dutch television stunt: investigative journalists confronted chocolate giants with the existence of child labour in their cocoa supply chains. When nothing changed, they started making ‘slave-free’ chocolate themselves. Two decades later, Tony’s has pushed traceability and higher processing standards into the mainstream of a global industry — landing it on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential companies in 2025. We traced Tony’s journey from 2003 until 2026 and reveal three important lessons for organisations who want to scale their social impact.
Lesson 1: Compete in the mass market, not a premium or niche market
Many social enterprises retreat – deliberately or because they are pushed to do so – into premium or niche markets, selling to a small group of already-convinced and socially minded consumers. This approach triggers less pushback from established companies and allows the social enterprise to sell products at a premium price, based on higher standards. However, it also means that the more sustainable or responsible product will never really threaten established companies that must change to achieve system change.
Tony’s did the opposite. Rather than staying in specialty shops, it pushed to get its chocolate onto the shelves of the Netherlands’ largest supermarket in 2010. This put Tony’s in direct competition with the same chocolate giants it was trying to change. That competitive exposure mattered: because more and more consumers bought ‘slave-free’ chocolate off the mainstream shelves and learned about the issues in the production of chocolate, established companies felt real pressure to respond – because they were losing market share, not just moral standing. Operating in the mass market turned Tony’s growth into a direct, visible threat that the established companies couldn’t ignore.
Lesson 2: Collaborate with key industry players
The scaling of social impact can rarely happen through one organization alone. Tony’s built deliberate partnerships with industry-spanning organisations that sit at the centre of the industry’s infrastructure —players whose standards and reach extend far beyond Tony’s own business and the chocolate industry.
Working with Fairtrade helped Tony’s improve its own sourcing model and standards, but it also pushed Fairtrade to raise its own standards within and beyond cocoa, including developing a “living income reference price” for cocoa which was later extended to other commodities such as cashew nuts, coffee, and others. Working with Barry Callebaut, the world’s largest cocoa processor, Tony’s developed a fully traceable supply chain and gave Callebaut a reason to offer the same opportunity to all its other clients. In both cases, collaborating with an industry-spanning organisation meant Tony’s improvements didn’t stay locked inside its own supply chain or the chocolate industry; they became available to other organisations within and even beyond the chocolate industry, too.
Lesson 3: Defend your approach and your solution when they come under attack
A social enterprise’s success and growth almost inevitably invite pushback, both from purists who think that a social enterprise’s growth compromises its solution; and from competitors who copy the easy parts of the solution while ignoring the rest. How a social enterprise responds in these moments can determine whether it keeps its competitive and moral ground or loses it.
When Tony’s was removed from a list of ethical chocolate companies over its partnership with Barry Callebaut, Tony’s didn’t give in to the criticism. It publicly defended the partnership, explaining that working with a major processor was the only way to making its sourcing principles achievable at industry scale. Standing strong and continuing to develop their own supply chain, rather than giving in to the criticism, avoided being pushed into a niche market.
Likewise, when competitors like Lidl and Marks & Spencer copied some of Tony’s product elements without adopting its underlying sourcing principles, Tony’s called them out publicly: if they wanted to copy the brand, they should copy the underlying principles, too, or even better, join its Open Chain programme. This willingness to publicly confront copycats, rather than quietly accepting a diluted imitation, protected the integrity of the solution and kept up the pressure on established companies to adopt it fully.
Putting the three lessons together
None of these three lessons works well in isolation. Competing in the mass market creates the visibility and competitive pressure that makes established companies pay attention. Collaborating with industry-spanning organisations turns that visibility into infrastructure and standards that can spread beyond one company and industry. And defending the approach and solution when they come under attack protects everything the first two lessons help to build, preventing erosion that turns a genuine challenger organization into a marginal player with a watered-down solution.
