There’s bad news, and there’s bad news. And if you’ve been shopping for your honey, you already know the news: Chocolate prices this Valentine’s Day are higher than ever before. But industry observers say relief is on the way. Maybe in time for next year…
Pure chocolate squares atop a foundation of cocoa powder. An endangered species…
Blame it on climate change. Crop ‘insufficiencies’ in the West African nations that grow the bulk of the world’s cocoa sent cocoa prices skyrocketing over the past several years. And the increase reflected at retail has been even higher.
“Consumer prices for chocolate have spiked 14.4 percent year-over-year during the January 1 to early February window, according to market intelligence firm Datasembly,” CNN economics reporter Matt Egan explained. “That’s a significant acceleration from the 7.8 percent price hike during the same period last year and 10.5 percent in 2024, according to the research firm, which tracked the best prices for more than 4,000 chocolate products across 57,000 stores across the United States.”
A crazy ride
Cocoa has been on a crazy ride the likes of which have never been seen before. A few West African countries supply more than 70 percent of the world’s cocoa. And they’ve been hit hard by droughts. The shortages that resulted drove global cocoa prices from (US)$2,500 per metric tonne in mid 2022 to $12,600 in late 2024 – an order of magnitude higher.
“Supply suddenly dropped even as demand stayed largely the same. Prices went through the roof,” David Branch, Sector Manager at the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, remarked.
The retail price of chocolate products has remained in the stratosphere since. But it’s also remained fairly unstable.
Good news, bad news…
The good news is, cocoa prices are now closer to their former reality. The bad news is, they’re still almost twice what they were in 2022, at around $4,000 per tonne.
And the worse news is, the chocolate products on the shelves this Valentine’s Day were made with beans priced at or near the crisis point.
My take
Climate change isn’t going to ease off any time soon. Much less, reverse itself. We can only rationally expect cocoa – and by association, chocolate – prices to keep rising over the coming years.
Given the narrow climatic zone in which cocoa thrives, we might even be looking at the loss of cocoa altogether by the mid 2030s. Unless growers start planting cocoa trees farther north now…
~ Maggie J.