"Big Chocolate" is a business term assigned to multi-national chocolate food producers, much akin to the terms assigned to "Big Oil" and "Big Tobacco".
According to self-described fair trade proponents including Ghanaian cooperative Kuapa Kokoo, "Big Chocolate" companies are Mondelez (which owns Cadbury), Mars, Nestlé, and The Hershey Company. Together these companies process about 12% of the world's 3 million tons of cocoa each year.
At the core of the chocolate debate across Europe, parts of Asia and the United States is the definition of chocolate itself, and whether percentages of cocoa in production should render some candies unable to carry the chocolate food definition.
At issue also is the ability to replace cocoa butter or dairy components of chocolate with cheaper vegetable fats or polyglycerol polyricinoleate (PGPR), thereby reducing the quantity of actual cocoa in the finished product while creating an arguably more unhealthy confection. Currently the United States, some parts of the European Union and Russia do not allow vegetable fats as ingredients of products labeled as chocolate. The United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark allow vegetable fat as an ingredient.
"Big Chocolate" also refers to the political and social effects of a unifying industry. Consolidated buying enables large cocoa users to wield significant impact in economies, many of them poor African nations, that rely on cocoa production as a critical element of foreign trade.