The world needs to brace itself for continued cocoa price rises...

Very interesting if not a rather scary article in The Times at the weekend. I've seen a minimum 85% increase in cocoa ingredient prices since April 2024 and the vast majority of that I'm absorbing. The big producers can do all sorts of things to mitigate that, as this report mentions, but as an artisan producer those options are not available. This level of raw ingredient price increase is just not sustainable so I will be forced to increase retail prices further and just have to hope that people understand why. 

Ivory Coast ceremony has already driven up the price of next year’s Easter eggs
By Richard Assheton, Abidjan - for The Times, Sunday 13th April

Easter eggs are more expensive this year and, as you may discover on Sunday, are also thinner.

That’s because chocolate costs more than it has for half a century. Having climbed gradually for decades, the price of cocoa got about five times higher over 18 months, hitting a record of more than £9 per kg late last year.

Ten days ago in west Africa the price of your 2026 Easter eggs was pushed higher still.

Ivory Coast and Ghana produce 60 per cent of the world’s cocoa and twice a year they fix their cocoa price for the coming harvest, in an effort to ensure farmers receive a stable income.

At a ceremony in Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast, Kobenan Kouassi Adjoumani, the agriculture minister, announced to a live audience and television viewers at home that the price of a kilogram of cocoa was set at 2,200 CFA francs (about £2.90). “It is,” he said, “a record price”.

A cheer erupted — but some in the crowd kept silent. Perhaps they were owners from Mars, Nestlé and the other chocolate giants. A few days later Ghana announced that its price was unchanged.

The era of cheap chocolate may be ending for good.

According to Which?, the consumer watchdog group, Easter eggs in Britain cost up to 50 per cent more than in 2024. A Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Giant Easter Egg 400g sells at Sainsbury’s for £15.50.

Confectionery giants are now scrambling to save costs, while exploring alternatives including replacing cocoa in the production process. At the same time, a new breed of smaller chocolate-makers is being forced to value cocoa more.

The rise stems from the rising cost of production.

Yields have plummeted — last year’s was half its usual volume. Mondelez, which owns brands such as Toblerone and Oreo, has blamed several factors: Ivory Coast and Ghana could become unsuitable for cocoa production within 30 years.

Aimee Tounkara, 40, one of the country’s “bean-to-bar” chocolate-makers in Ivory Coast, said: “When it only rains once, rains in the beans won’t dry and they will rot.”

Farmers have also had to destroy hundreds of millions of trees affected by the cacao swollen shoot virus, carried by mealybugs. A new tree takes five years to grow and many farmers have neither the money nor will to replant.

Cocoa is a brutally labour-intensive crop. Despite efforts to stamp out child exploitation, an estimated 1.5 million children are still thought to work in Ivory Coast and Ghana’s fields.

Margins are thin. For every £1 chocolate bar sold in the supermarket, the chocolate brand typically receives about 35p, after adding sugar and other milk to beans in factories in the West. The farmer’s share is about 6p.

Most cocoa farmers are now in their fifties at least, typically getting by on about $1 (77p) a day. The future of the industry is unclear.

“The children don’t want to work,” said Ange Aboa, an Ivorian filmmaker and cocoa expert. “They prefer to be mechanics, to drive motorcycles, to do other things, but not cocoa. Because they saw the poverty of their parents. They don’t want to be poor for 50 years like their parents.”

Laws including an incoming EU directive that says all cocoa sold in Europe must be sourced to a specific farm are pushing the chocolate giants to invest in sustainability programmes, driving up costs. Everyone I spoke to expected prices would keep climbing.

That gives manufacturers few options. They can continue to raise prices while reducing product sizes. Or they can continue to lower the percentage of cocoa in their chocolate, even replacing it completely.

There is one more option: to train consumers to pay more for a better product.

Claire Burnett, 57, and her husband Andy, 59, set up Chococo in Swanage, Dorset, in 2002. They work directly with farmers and chocolate makers in Colombia, Venezuela and Madagascar, developing chocolates of all shades. Instead of 20 per cent cocoa, their milk chocolate contains 49 per cent (a bar is about £5). Chococo’s 600g Easter egg sells for £33.50.

“We don’t give chocolate the same respect that we do craft coffee or wines or olive oils or cheeses,” Claire Burnett said.