Chocolate brand Toblerone must drop the image of the Matterhorn mountain peak from its packaging after 50 years, as it switches some of its manufacturing to another country.
American confectionery giant Mondelez, which also owns brands Cadbury and Oreo, will shift some production of its triangular chocolate bars to Slovakia from Switzerland.
The move falls short of “Swissness” marketing rules introduced in 2017, which restrict the use of Swiss national symbols in food, industrial products and services.
For a food product to be marketed as “made in Switzerland”, 80 per cent of the raw ingredients must be sourced from the country with most processing taking place there.
For milk and milk-based products, the required quota is 100 per cent, with exceptions for ingredients that cannot be sourced from Switzerland, such as cocoa.
Mondelez announced last year that from the end of 2023 it would move some of the production to Bratislava, where it also produces the Milka chocolate brand first made in Switzerland.
The Matterhorn image will be replaced with a more generic alpine summit, Mondelez said.
A company spokesman told the Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung: “The packaging redesign introduces a modernised and streamlined mountain logo that aligns with the geometric and triangular aesthetic.”
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The newspaper reported that the packaging will replace “of Switzerland” to “established in Switzerland”.
Toblerone was founded by Theodor Tobler in the Swiss capital Bern and first launched in 1908. The city’s symbolic animal, a bear, is hidden in the peak design.
Toblerone’s pyramid-shaped pieces are intended to resemble the Matterhorn, one of the most recognisable peaks in the Alps which sits on the border between Italy and Switzerland. It first appeared on the packaging in 1970.
The word Toblerone is a play on the founder’s family name and torrone, the Italian word for honey and almond nougat, according to the Mondelez website.
In 2016, Mondelez increased the gap between the chunks of chocolate of its UK bars as part of cost-saving measures to reduce the weight of the bar from 170g to 150g. It reverted back to its original shape in 2018 after facing public outrage.
