Toblerone bars, sold in over 100 countries, will no longer be called Swiss chocolate. Its company will also have to remove the Mountain peak from its packaging as the brand’s US owner is moving some production out of Switzerland, according to CNN. Mondelez (MDLZ), which makes Toblerone has decided to shift some manufacturing to the Slovakian capital of Bratislava.
The pyramid-shaped bar will now undergo labelling revamp and include its founder’s signature.
“For legal reasons, the changes we’re making to our manufacturing mean we need to adjust our packaging to comply with Swissness legislation. We have removed our Swissness claim from the front of the Toblerone pack and changed our description ‘of Switzerland’ to ‘established in’,” a Mondelez spokesperson told CNN.
Under Switzerland’s Swissness Act, passed in the year 2017, national symbols are not allowed to be used to promote milk-based products that are not made exclusively in Switzerland.
According to the act, all food products claiming to be “Swiss-made” must be produced with 80% of the raw materials sourced from Switzerland itself. While for milk and dairy products it is 100 per cent, reported CNN. Essential processing is also required to be done in the country.
The new packaging of the bar will now have a “distinctive new Toblerone typeface and logo that draw further inspiration from the Toblerone archives and the inclusion of our founder, Tobler’s, signature”, said Mondelez to BBC.
The mountain-shaped Swiss chocolate created by Tobler and his cousin Emil Baumann first went on sale in 1908 in Bern, the capital city of Switzerland, according to the Mondelez website.
“Bern is an important part of our history and will continue to be so for the future,” the company’s spokesperson was quoted as saying by CNN.
In 2016 Toblerone had tried to change the design of the chocolate bar to space out the distinctive triangular chunks in a bid to keep down costs. But after being criticised for the move, the company reverted to the original shape two years later.