Our co-founder Claire was on the radio today talking about what is driving higher chocolate prices!

If you were listening to the Wake up to Money programme on Radio5 Live or the Today programme on Radio 4 earlier this morning, you will have heard our co-founder Claire being interviewed by Felicity Hannah on why chocolate Easter eggs are more expensive (some as much as 50% more) and (sometimes) lighter in weight. Claire explained that whilst we havent raised our prices nearly as much as others, & neither have we decreased the weights of our Easter eggs, the reason for the increases is due to the rapid increase in the global price of cocoa on the commodity market which started in Spring last year from a previous average of around $3,000 a tonne to peaks of over $12,000 a tonne last April & again in December. There has been increasing press interest in the increased price of chocolate and what is driving it as Claire was also interviewed for an article in last week's Sunday Times by Richard Assheton about the challenges being faced by cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast, the world's biggest cocoa producer, accounting for 40% of total production. Claire is quoted as saying that as western consumers 'We dont give chocolate the same respect that we do craft coffee, wines or olive oils or cheeses'. This is a summary by Claire of the challenges being faced in the production of cocoa and why the prices are so much higher: The global cocoa price has been rising sharply in the last year, peaking at $12,900 per tonne in December, driven by primarily by recent poor harvests from the Ivory Coast & Ghana, the two cocoa producing countries accounting for over 60% of global cocoa production. Whilst we don’t work with bulk cocoa from West Africa, any decline in harvests there affects the global price of cocoa. The recent poor harvests are a result of bad weather accelerating long term sustainability issues, driven in large part by the policies in the Ivory Coast & Ghana. Unlike in other cocoa growing regions around the world, government-run cocoa boards in these countries set the price that cocoa farmers are paid and this ‘farmgate price’ has traditionally been set well below the market price. This has suited the multinational companies, known as ‘Big Chocolate’, as it has kept the price of cocoa down and has allowed them to train consumers to think of chocolate as a cheap food. However, this artificial suppression of the price that the 1.5 million cocoa farmers in these countries are paid has had a disastrous effect on the long-term viability of growing cocoa in West Africa. Whilst the farmgate prices have been increased recently in response to the price shock, in the Ivory Coast it is now $3,620 per tonne and Ghana it is still only $3,070 per tonne which is well below the current market price of c$8,000 tonne. The average output of a cocoa farmer in Ghana is just 1 tonne per year as most are smallholder farmers with farms of less than 5 hectares. This is at the root of the problem, if the cocoa farmers are not earning a living wage, it is a downward spiral. Cocoa farmers are getting older as young farmers don’t want to grow cocoa. They cannot afford to employ workers, hence the issues with child labour in West Africa. They cannot afford to invest in their farms, so they have aging cocoa trees with increased risk of disease and decreasing yields. If you then overlay climate change, affecting the formerly regular wet and dry seasons, you have a perfect storm of issues that result in poor harvests and sharply rising prices. So, cocoa needs to be treated with the respect that it is due. Why do we treat coffee, wine and olive oils with more respect and are prepared to pay high prices for them? Cocoa will only grow in ‘the cocoa belt’, up to 20 degrees either side of the Equator and it is a slow food for farmers to grow. It takes 5 years to grow a cocoa tree that will bear fruit for harvesting and then once it is mature, at least 6 months from flower to ripe cocoa pods ready to harvest, plus fermentation and drying time before farmers have cocoa beans they can sell. The cocoa price will never go back down to the artificially low price it was before 2024 and neither should it. We as consumers in the West need to stop thinking of it as a cheap food and cocoa farmers in West Africa need to be paid a living wage in order for them to invest in their farms and make it an economically viable crop for them and their families.