Toblerone chocolate may lose its iconic Swiss Mountain logo

• Toblerone is going to unpack the iconic image of the Swiss Matterhorn.
• That’s because Mondelez, the American parent company, is moving part of the Toblerone production to Slovakia.
• Switzerland has laws regulating the use of national symbols and products claiming to be Swiss made.

Six years after a disastrous change to the shape of its chocolate bars, Toblerone is about to make another change – this time it wants to remove the iconic image of the Matterhorn mountain from its chocolate wrapper.

Mondelez International Inc., the U.S. parent company that owns the chocolate brand, is moving some of Toblerone’s production to Slovakia — meaning the chocolate may not meet the Swiss legal definition of “Swissness,” according to Aargauer Zeitung, a Swiss media outlet that first reported the news on Friday.

Legislation was enacted in 2017 to protect “Swissness”, requiring any food product that markets itself as “made in Switzerland” to source 80% of its raw materials from the country.

Milk and dairy products labeled “made in Switzerland” must source 100% of their raw materials from the country – although there are exceptions for raw materials that cannot be produced in Switzerland – such as cocoa, the majority of which comes from Africa.

The law also covers the use of Swiss symbols, including symbols that indicate a geographical area.

Toblerone’s new branding will feature a “modernized and streamlined” logo instead of the jagged outline of the Matterhorn, according to Aargauer Zeitung. The Matterhorn debuted in 1970 on the packaging of Toblerone, according to the brand’s page.

It also drops “made in Switzerland” from the packaging. “We will relaunch the Toblerone packaging starting this summer and say the brand is ‘based in Switzerland,’” Livia Kolmitz, a spokeswoman for Mondelez, told Reuters.

The forthcoming change to Toblerone’s packaging comes after the controversial move in 2016 to reduce the weight of the bars in the UK by making the gaps between each triangular chocolate “peak” more prominent to cut costs. It reversed the move less than two years later.

Mondelez did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, which was sent outside of regular business hours.