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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.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT), a leading philanthropic organisation endowed by Rowntree’s profits, has appointed a head of reparations, who will start work later this month.

The recruitment of Prof Keon West, a social psychologist, is a step forward for the reparations movement in the UK as global pressure on former colonial powers intensifies.

A Rhodes scholar who grew up in Jamaica, West is the critically acclaimed author of The Science of Racism.

In the foreword to a report on reparations by the Runnymede Trust thinktank last year, West said: “Reparations are not just about historical accountability – they are about recognising the structures and systems that still shape economic injustice today.”

In 1904 the philanthropist Joseph Rowntree endowed the JRCT with profits from the chocolate and cocoa businesses he had branched into after leaving his family’s Victorian grocery.

JRCT was founded along Quaker principles to tackle the roots of injustices. However, research into the York-headquartered grant-maker, triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement, found African and Asian workers had been exploited in the production of goods at the heart of Rowntree businesses in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 2021, the Rowntree Society, the educational trust funded in part by JRCT, said it had found no evidence the Rowntree family had “owned” or traded in enslaved people. However, it identified that Rowntree business interests had “sold commodities of empire … likely to have been produced by enslaved or unfree workers” going back to 1822.

Rowntree enterprises also benefited from indenture – the system of bonded labour in which Asian workers were recruited to plantations in the Caribbean after slavery ended. In the 1890s, Rowntree & Co bought plantations in Dominica, Jamaica and Trinidad to cultivate cocoa, limes, bananas, coffee and coconuts.

In the early 20th century, Rowntree & Co bought cocoa and other goods produced by enslaved Africans in the Portuguese-colonised West African islands São Tomé and Príncipe. There were also Rowntree interests in colonial Nigeria, Ghana and apartheid South Africa.

In the early 1980s, Black workers at South African subsidiary Wilson Rowntree were suppressed by oppressive labour practices.

In 2021 JCRT said it was “deeply sorry” for the historical connections to “abhorrent practices” and for previously overlooking them, adding: “Such actions caused extreme and enduring harms and we recognise their role in embedding the systemic racism that is still present in the UK and globally.”

The trust said it would be strengthening “our contribution to racial justice” and would engage with affected communities to develop a longer-term plan for restorative justice, shaped by “Black people, brown people and people of colour”.

West, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics who is head of research at the Runnymede Trust, will design and lead JCRT’s reparations programme. He said: “I am honoured to accept this role. It offers the power and the responsibility to make real, meaningful changes in the lives of those who have been exploited.”

Nicola Purdy, the chief executive of JRCT, said it was “delighted” to welcome West and that it was “important to us that our reparations programme – which will further our charitable purposes for the public benefit – addresses injustices and their lasting impact”.

The Rowntree family was one of a trio of Quaker business dynasties at the centre of the confectionery trade in the colonial era – including the Fry and Cadbury families. Nestle acquired the Rowntree’s brand in 1988.

JCRT says it funds organisations that prioritise peace, equality, human rights and the climate crisis, making £13.5m in grants in 2025.

In 2023 it gave £10,000 to the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations, which has been calling on the UK government to formally apologise for slavery and colonisation.