The Mount Matterhorn mountain will no longer appear on the iconic yellowish triangular packaging of Toblerone chocolate. The American owner of the brand will transfer part of the production out of Switzerland and this change makes it impossible for the label to continue displaying the peak of the most famous mountain in the Alps, since it would violate the Swissness Law.
Under Switzerland’s Swissness Act, passed in 2017, national symbols and Swiss crosses are not allowed on the packaging of products that do not meet the established criteria. Specifically, the rule stipulates that food products that use Swiss symbols or that claim to be “made in Switzerland” must be made with at least 80% raw materials from that country and contain 100% of its milk and milk products. .
In addition, according to the Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung, the production work must also be done in Switzerland for them to be listed as ‘made in Switzerland’. And exceptions are only made with some of the raw materials that are not found in the country, such as cocoa.
Mondelez, the Toblerone producer and distributor, anticipated last year that it planned to move part of its production points to the Slovak capital of Bratislava. With this change, it would breach the provisions of the Swissness Law and would have to say goodbye to the image that appears on its triangular packaging.
But the company is reluctant to lose that iconic image entirely. The company is changing the packaging design to represent a more generic mountain instead of the famous Matterhorn, according to this outlet.
“The packaging redesign features a streamlined, modernized mountain logo, which aligns with the geometric and triangular aesthetic,” a Mondelez spokesperson told Aargauer Zeitung. The information offered to the consumer will also change. Instead of explaining that it is a product “of Switzerland”, it will indicate that Toblerone is “established in Switzerland”.
Toblerone has been produced for more than a century in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, and from there it is distributed throughout the world. Cousins ??Theodor Tobler and Emil Baumann were the inventors in 1908 of this singular sweet, whose name combines the surname of the first of them and that of “torrone”, as the Italian honey and almond nougat is called.
