Rowntree’s trust appoints Keon West to tackle brand’s colonial history

A 1910s box of Rowntree's Mountain milk chocolate. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

It’s a story that connects the inventors of the KitKat – the beloved British chocolate bar – with colonial history and its legacies.

Now, the ways in which enslavement, indenture and European imperialism fed supply chains for Rowntree’s, the confectioners who invented Fruit Pastilles and Smarties as well as KitKat, are being confronted.